Department of English Abstracts

Presenter(s): Emily Muraco, Kylie Mummendey, Faith Payne

Showcase Advisor: Kayla Adgate

Moderator: Kayla Adgate

Abstract:  

Emily Muraco, “The Intricate Network of Bird and Cage Imagery in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows,” My essay examines the intricate network of bird and cage imagery in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, arguing that these motifs challenge the perceived freedom of the novel's anthropomorphic protagonists. While Mole, Ratty, and Toad appear to move with human-like agency, Grahame utilizes specific symbols—the silhouetted caged bird, the dungeon canary, and migratory swallows—to reveal "invisible enclosures" constructed by social dynamics, emotional dependencies, and psychological delusions. The domestic bird reflects Mole’s emotional deference to Ratty, while Toad’s status as a "gaol-bird" underscores how his own vanity and impulsivity create self-inflicted confinement. Additionally, the migratory swallows embody an unattainable detachment that highlights Ratty’s bondage to habit and identity. Ultimately, Grahame’s imagery serves as a meditation on the paradox of longing for flight while inhabiting structures—social, emotional, or instinctual—that make absolute freedom impossible.

Faith Paine, “The Garden Chase,” This creative writing assignment was tilted toying with narrative perspective. I decided to choose Beatrix Potter’s book Peter Rabbit because I had a personal connection to it because my mom read it to me when I was younger. Instead of telling the garden chase scene from Peter's point of view, I told it from Mr. McGregor’s. I aimed to examine the effect of altering the narrative perspective on the reader's understanding of the characters, and their conflict. In changing perspective from an animal to a human, I also changed the antagonist. This change resulted my audience feeling sympathy for Mr. McGregor and his love for his garden. My craft focused on rhythm, emotional softness, and sensory detail to create real environments where character and surroundings coexist. This makes it possible to connect Mr. McGregor’s daily task of tending to a garden to the surprisingly deep range of human experience.

Kylie Mummendey, “Man's Perception of Snakes,” This essay examines why humans see snakes in such a negative light. Using examples from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K Rowling, and the Bible, it explores how characters who are given snake-like traits are perceived by others. By examining physical and psychological attributes linked to snakes, this essay shows how these associations influence other characters' feelings about a person given these qualities. Ultimately, this text illustrates how literature reinforces the cultural symbolism of snakes being seen as untrustworthy tricksters.

Presenter(s): Benjamin Ruszala, Nailah Brightman, Hadyn Archambeault, Miranda O'Sullivan, Saylor Skidds, Stephen Piazza

Showcase Advisor: Jil Hanifan

Abstract: The managing editors, editors, and contributors to the Undergraduate literary magazine, ARCH, will present and read the work featured in the Spring 2026 edition of the journal. The reading will also feature several high school students who won the 2025/2026 University in the High School creative writing contest. The contributors to ARCH will have created a wide variety of content, including poetry, short fiction, micromemoir and/or visual art. ARCH works to foster a diverse, cooperative community of writers and to develop their literary skills in tandem with developing editorial skills in the managing team and the editor's collective.

Presenter(s): Nevaeh Barrington, Zaila Brinson, Joseph Hart, Anaia Dawkins

Showcase Advisor: Wendy Roberts

Moderator: Wendy Roberts

Abstract: This panel examines women writers' portrayal of freedom in captivity in late 17th-century New England through texts written centuries apart. Panelists discuss Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), and Toni Morrison’s novel, A Mercy (2008), set in the 1680s and 1690s, both texts that aim to rewrite colonial history. The panelists will explore questions of who narrates history and what is at stake for the understanding of the past. The narratives in question will be examined through the cross-sections of gender and race and panelists will incorporate archival research.

Presenter(s): Jacqueline Arena, Caroline Auerfeld, Avery Collins-Mance, Amaya Neuwirth, Kamal Tomlin, Caroline Bittle

Showcase Advisor: Wendy Roberts

Moderator: Paul Stasi

Abstract: Modernist literature expresses, at one and the same time, an exhilaration and terror at the developments of the modern world. In this roundtable, we will discuss several works of modernist literature, noting their contradictory expression of the dialectic of modernity.

Presenter(s): Angelina Foley, Kylieann Krause, Lillian Magurno, Morgan Burlison

Showcase Advisor: Wendy Roberts

Moderator: Wendy Roberts

Abstract:  

Angelina Foley, “Historical Authority in Writing,” In this thesis, I investigate how narrative influences historiographical authority. I explore how we determine what is historically “true” amid competing stories. This question has become increasingly urgent in today’s media environment where biased news sources and emerging technologies such as AI shape how information is produced, circulated and believed. Understanding how credibility and authorship are constructed is therefore essential not only for interpreting the past but for navigating the present.  Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich serves as my central case study for exploring historiographical authority. Ohler’s book, which blends archival research with novelistic storytelling reached a wide public audience and sparked intense debate among historians. Its commercial success contrasted sharply with the skepticism and even hostility it received in academic circles. This tension provides a compelling entry point into broader questions about narrative, credibility and the boundaries separating factual historiography from interpretive storytelling.

Morgan Burlison, “Murmurations,” This creative thesis aims to reevaluate dementia’s association with a "soulless" body by exploring subjectivity in terms of relational experiences (Sacks 1973). Inspired by Emilija Talijan’s analysis of Gaspar Noés’s film, Vortex, the story follows a woman whose devoted caregiving preserves a sense of autonomy for her mother with dementia, challenging the loss-centered framework in conventional dementia narratives. The second person point of view captures the daughter’s willingness to see her mother as an active participant in their interactions, not a failing subject, and highlights how patients engage with their environments beyond the traditional scope of lost memory and identity. I reveal the intricacies of grief and storytelling in relation to these themes, notably bringing to light how families navigate the hardships that come with dementia.

Kylieann Krause, “Poe to Peele: The Reflection of Cultural Anxieties within Horror’s Architecture,” This thesis repositions Edgar Allan Poe’s work by shifting from the traditional psychological lens to an analysis of physical architecture and the cultural anxieties it can reflect. Through close readings of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Masque of the Red Death, it argues that Poe’s structures express Antebellum fears surrounding class instability, urban transformation, and contagion, while establishing an early foundation for architectural horror. Moving to contemporary horror, this project also examines Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope, analyzing how their architecture becomes vessels for racialized fear and historical trauma. I draw on W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison to argue architecture’s enduring role in shaping the horror genre’s cultural work.

Lillian Magurno, “Thicker Than Water: Stories of the individuals who make up post-war families,” In the 1950s, the traditional family was portrayed in a positive light, with the image of a well-kept happy family with a stay-at-home mother and a breadwinning father. What is not seen in this popular image are the life-altering experiences of each family during the second World War. Following an unprecedented time of change, conflict, and trauma, the members in a 1950s family are secretly struggling to conform to 1950s expectations because of their war-time lives. This presentation highlights and dissects excerpts from a creative English thesis, where each family member is given a short story that expresses their perspective on their life during and after the war. These short stories look to pull back the curtain on the bright and colorful images of the 1950s to show how repression and overlooked trauma can affect the functionality of a family.

Presenter(s): Fiona Faccilonga, Katharine Lewis, Kris Ferber, Maggie Zehr, Sydney Nguyen

Showcase Advisor: Ineke Murakami

Moderator: Ineke Murakami

Abstract: Fiona Faccilonga, “Bonny and Read: Piracy, Crossdressing, and Gender Transformation in the Eighteenth Century,” This thesis returns to the eighteenth century to examine piracy, crossdressing, and gender transformation through two of the most renowned female pirates in history, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Using A General History of Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson as its primary source, this project argues that Johnson attempts to control the women’s narrative by refeminizing them through moments of bodily revelation. This presentation will specifically examine his use of the breasts, the beard, and the belly as ways to diminish their exploits as pirates. Johnson uses the feminine body to reveal “the truth”, which is their femininity beneath their masculine facades. He tries to paint their crossdressing as a performance rather than inherent to their character and ties them to conventional femininity, emphasizing their sexuality and domesticity. However, Bonny and Read’s actions, both historically and textually, resist this containment. 

Kris Ferber, “Jazz Under Water,” Speculative fiction can be a bleak genre. Take for instance surveillance in 1984, the destruction of information and the arts in Fahrenheit 451 and humanity's eradication in Oryx & Crake. My thesis NOLA 2150 speculates a future where New Orleans has sunken underwater due to rising sea levels but has been saved by an Atlantis glass dome to preserve the city. Not only the place but the culture remains the same with people celebrating in the bars, the clubs and the streets because the depths of the ocean can't stop the music. 

Sydney Nguyen, “Kindness Without Hope: Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness as a refugee novel,” Recent critiques and reviews of Ocean Vuong’s second novel The Emperor of Gladness include praises for Vuong’s nuanced assessments of marginalized American lives post 9/11, as well as scrutiny against his assumed position of representation for the Vietnamese American refugee community and their children. This is not a new struggle for refugee writers but still an emergent one, especially for Vietnamese American writers in diaspora. While the thesis focuses on a singular work, the context in which such work can exist relies on an oeuvre of refugee experiences unable to be represented fully in reports and only comprehensible in artistic delivery. Vuong’s poetic style remains constant in his prose writing, which poses a challenge for the structure of realism itself, yet invites readers to a different reading of a refugee text. 

Maggie Zehr, “Narratives of Nuclear Trauma,” This MA examination investigates how writers, artists, and filmmakers represent the trauma of nuclear events, including atomic bombings, nuclear disasters, and weapons testing. I chose this topic to explore trauma theory because I believe that the scale of these disasters often exceeds human comprehension, and the effects of trauma last through several generations. I am also interested in exploring nuclear trauma in a political context that deals with questions about censorship, secrecy, and differing opinions between scientific experts. The reading list will contain survivor testimony, fiction, poetry, theoretical pieces, and visual media to study changes in narrative forms over time and in different catastrophes. Within these genres are witness accounts, oral history, satire, and contemporary protest art to study the representation of traumatic memory. 

Katharine Lewis, “Bodies in Between: Biopolitics and Corporeal Violation in Gothic Fiction,” This presentation examines how Gothic literature destabilizes the boundary between life and death by presenting the dead body as a site of unresolved power, vulnerability, and control. Focusing on nineteenth-century British Gothic fiction, I argue that preservation, resurrection, and medical intervention, whether enacted by human institutions or supernatural forces, transform the body into a site where legal authority, scientific rationalization, and supernatural violence converge to undermine bodily sovereignty. Read through a biopolitical lens, these texts expose the conditions under which the body may be violated, reanimated, reused, or preserved, suggesting that attempts to save or restore the body often product the opposite effect, reducing the subject to a state in which the body persists while agency is lost. Readings of transfusion and transformation in Dracula and resurrection narratives from Frankenstein to contemporary horror illustrate how Gothic literature imagines resurrection as a condition of dispossession, exposing the instability of bodily autonomy.

Presenter(s): Ky Krause, Chloe Ferro

Showcase Advisor: Wendy Roberts

Moderator: Elliot Tetreault

Abstract: This panel emerges from a fall 2025 senior seminar for English majors, AENG 450Y: Glitch Writing. Featuring two student presenters and moderated by the professor of the class, the panel will explore glitch writing as a critical and creative framework for engaging with technology in the humanities. Panelists will discuss topics including the rise of surveillance technology in education; the labor politics of artificial intelligence; and the value of creative experimentation and play in humanistic inquiry. Drawing from critical technology studies at the intersection of queer, feminist, Black, and disability theory, our panel does not take an anti-technology stance, but instead asks how educators and students can preserve and advocate for human creativity in increasingly technologized environments.

Presenter(s): Kehinde Adejumo, Emma Gordon

Showcase Advisor: Kasey Waite

Moderator: Elliot Tetreault

Abstract:

Kehinde Adejumo, “Disney Lied To Us: Toxic Couples And Their The Impact on Gen Z,” From 2006 to 2019, Disney Channel's live-action programming helped shape the cultural landscape of Gen Z's formative years. While these shows frequently centered romantic subplots, many relationships portrayed toxic dynamics such as jealousy, dishonesty, and manipulation. Despite this, such couples were often framed as desirable and beloved, raising questions about media responsibility and its influence on young audiences. Although scholarship exists on television's role in shaping adolescent ideas, little attention has been given to Disney Channel's role in modeling relational dynamics. This thesis argues that Disney Channel's portrayals of dysfunctional yet romanticized couples normalized unhealthy behaviors and contributed to Gen Z's acceptance of situationships and hookup culture. Using psychoanalytic and cultural studies frameworks, I analyze four select live-action series alongside scholarship on adolescent media influence. Ultimately, this research highlights how childhood media continues to shape Gen Z's attitudes towards dating, intimacy, and relationships in adulthood.

Emma Gordon, “Female Familial Roles and Fatalistic Suicide in Literature,” This paper examines the excessive domestic regulation and subsequent loss of identity faced by the female protagonists in three literary works: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen." Each of the three women take on a different role in their family, but whether their primary role is a daughter, a sister, or a mother, they all find themselves on the same deadly path towards Émile Durkheim’s definition of a fatalistic suicide. This paper analyzes how these three women, though living under vastly different circumstances across different periods of time, each face the same pressure to conform to the timeless gendered expectations of selflessness and servitude, leading them to ultimately sacrifice their own lives because they believe it best for their families.

Presenter(s): Wyatt Dodge, Lauren Dodds, Peep Brooks-Ambrosi

Showcase Advisor: Kasey Waite

Moderator: Kasey Waite

Abstract:  

Peep Brooks-Ambrosi, “Eleanor's Doomed Narrative: Her Hands,” Within Shirley Jackson’s narratives we always seem to find a morally gray and complex female character who represent a myriad of unhealthy, obsessive, and hauntingly emotional journey displays the fractured patriarchy and a woman’s place therein. Such is the plight of Eleanor Vance as our protagonist in The Haunting of Hill House. Eleanor’s self-doubt and pity mixes with Jackson’s mastery of the gothic to display a myriad of mental anguishes, woman’s suffering, and the complex scale that becomes Eleanor’s rationality. I argue that Eleanor’s emotional journey can be easily tracked through the physical representation of her hands, which in turn directly tells the reader about Eleanor’s emotional state. Jackson displays Eleanor’s eventual demise, allowing us to see it unfolding front and center.

Lauren Dodds, “Boarders and Boundaries: Shirley Jackson's Clever Use of Setting,” In her novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson devises setting into a tool that creates the difference between life and death. On the surface, these two novels are completely unrelated except by the author who wrote them. In my essay, however, I show substantial similarities through the notion of gates. I compare how Jackson’s depiction of an old house guarded by a gate in each novel creates themes of exile, danger, and what happens when the wrong boundaries are crossed. This is further illustrated by how both novels center themselves around death, and the majority of both novels take place within a guarded property. Through this exploration of boarders and divisions, I argue that Jackson cleverly reverses the expectation about who needs protecting by playing with or, or what, lies on either side of these boundaries.

Wyatt Dodge, “Shirley Jackson: Modernization of the Gothic Heroine,” Shirley Jackson is often applauded for modernizing and subverting the tropes of women protagonists in classic gothic literature. For instance, in The Haunting of Hill House, the protagonist, Eleanor Vance, doesn't strictly adhere to the stereotypical rules of a gothic heroine, while still being rooted in them.Therefore, this paper will analyze how Jackson uses three commonly found tropes in gothic novels in unique ways. By looking at the tropes of the gothic virgin, agency, and romantic interests, I argue that Jackson finds new ways to highlight the continued struggles of women in society.

Presenter(s): Thiri Lin Bo, Katie Anne O’Gallagher, Julietta Castro, Kiera Garcia, Junhee Kim

Showcase Advisor: Wendy Roberts

Moderator: Wendy Roberts

Abstract: Panelists will present critical readings of the novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown. Student panelists will attend to questions of legal status, moral citizenship, the gothic, nature, racial relations, Christian morality, Christian afterlife, the acceptable outsider versus the unacceptable outsider, and justified versus unjustified violence, and how these are conceptualized (often in relationship to each other) in early America. Alongside the critical readings, panelists will introduce related and new archival research.

Presenter(s): Fiona Glenn-Keough, Johnathan Bramhall, Nat Zhichkin, Morgan Bissell, Sara St. Preuve, Chloe Ferro, Jordan Dooley

Showcase Advisor: Yolande Schutter

Moderator: Yolande Schutter  

Abstract: This presentation will be comprised of 7 student-poets who, through their involvement with AENG402Z with Professor Schutter in Fall of 2025, completed their first poetry chapbooks. Students developed chapbook themes, original poems, and poetics statements in advance of creating their own, physical chapbooks through their collaboration with UAlbany's Alice Hastings Murphy Preservation Department. Students explored how structuring their texts affected their texts' physical production, and, conversely, how their texts' physical production affected readers' relationships to those texts. Students will present their chapbooks and discuss their processes, poetry, and poetics in order to explore their own development as poets, writers, and thinkers.

Presenter(s): Sara St. Preuve, Evelyn Mckenzie, Devon Dawes, Zaila Brinson, Olvia Nelson, Parker Lewis, Lee Charles, Miranda O'Sullivan, Melissa Villatoro Santos, Leo Quinn, Parmesh Kamptapersaud, Aidan Morrissey

Showcase Advisor: James Searle

Moderator: James Searle

Abstract: Panelists will explore how Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man speaks to questions of race, education, identity, and belonging in contemporary America, reflecting on their work in English 343. Drawing on classroom discussions and concepts from literary criticism and theory, panelists will interpret specific passages from the novel to explore Ellison's claims for the importance of art—and vernacular forms like jazz in particular—for living in a diverse democratic society. How might these resources inform the way we think about education, identity, and meaning-making today? In a world continually reshaped by unpredictable technological, political, and social forces, what does Ellison's vision of coming of age offer us? Students will present short papers and respond to one another's work, bringing Ellison's mid-century novel into conversation with our present moment.