English Department Hosts Capstone Symposium
By Laila Rashid, CHASS Dean’s Office Student Intern
March 12, 2015
Tomorrow, the English department will host a capstone symposium in which students enrolled in English 193 A-B, the senior seminar instructed by Distinguished Professor John Ganim, will be presenting their research.
“This experience will be invaluable, especially for our students who are entering graduate school next year,” said Ganim. “It’s especially exciting in a low-consensus field, where professors and students study many different and widely separated subjects. It allows us to listen to each other and speak to each other as peers.”
In the fall, seminar students explored topics of time, memory and literature, and sampled works from the entire span of English and American literatures as well as some from other languages and cultures. According to the 193A syllabus, each week students read a brief excerpt from an important critical work on the subject, in addition to a novel, play, or poem that has influenced the way people think about memory and time. Requirements for the course included class presentations, a one page weekly mini-paper, and a term paper worthy of development into a senior thesis. This quarter, the seminar students expanded and revised their papers to prepare it for presentation at the symposium and publication in the English Department Undergraduate Journal.
Raul Aguilera, a fourth-year English major who took the seminar to help him prepare for graduate school, described it as “a unique opportunity in which we, as undergrads, can do research within our major and within our department without going into a campus wide program.” His thesis is titled, “A Feminist Approach to Temporality and Space in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.”
The event will take place in the English department conference room (HMNSS 2212) from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and will include four sessions of nine presentations. Buffet lunch and reception will follow immediately after.
*** Symposium flyer ***
