Emerson Honors Students Present at National Conference

Six Emerson College juniors in the Honors Program traveled to Seattle in October to present their work at the 2016 National Collegiate Honors Council Conference, with the theme of “Know Yourself.”

Presenters, who represented a wide range of majors and study topics, were selected from a larger pool of submissions to the conference’s Student Interdisciplinary Research Panels.

Emerson students presenting at the October 12–16 conference were:

Kelsey Aijala (Marketing Communications major/Publishing minor) – “The Perception of Reality and the Fantasy-Reality Distinction in Children”

Maggie Cannan (Media Arts Production/Comedy Writing and Performance) – “Funny and Feminine: The Rise of the Comedienne Within Phallocentric Social Discourse”

Katherine Hildebrandt (Writing, Literature and Publishing/Entrepreneurial Studies) – “The Maternal Body under a Microscope: Deconstructing a Culture of Sexualization and Censorship”

Emily Hillebrand (WLP) – “Questioning the Pledge of Allegiance”

Anne Makielski (Political Communication) – “The Performance of Personas: Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Gender Performance, and the Double Bind”

Lucie Pereira (WLP/Postcolonial Studies) – “Containing Multitudes: Representations of Multiracial Identity in Literature and Film”

The students traveled with WLP Professor Wendy Walters, director of the Honors Program, and Erika Williams, assistant professor in the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Writer Sherman Alexie gave the plenary speech at the conference. Alexie has published 25 books and has won a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Citation for Best First Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.