2008 Kemp Symposium
Let me know what you thought of the Kemp Symposium. Comment on the session you attended, info about what was covered, and what you thought of the presentations. We are also looking for suggestions for next year- what would you change about the Symposium, and what would you keep the same for next year?
I attended the Creative Writing lecture at the Symposium today led by Professor Lorentzen. This was one of the topics/sessions which interested me the most because I enjoy hearing other students style of writing and ideas. I thought there was a good variety of excerpts from short stories in the series, ranging from a typical morning at college, corpses, to creepy babysitters hitting on underage children. All of the readers did an awesome job expressing their stories. I know I would have had a hard time doing that so I definitly give them credit. I wish there was more time alloted at the end of the session to be able to talk to the writers about their inspirations and what not. I know that this would take up more time or shorten the readings, but I feel it might be worthwhile.
I also went to the Creative Writing lecture led by Professor Lorentzen on Monday at 1. Six students read excerpts from stories they’ve written and all did a fantastic job. There was a variety of material – everything from light-hearted and funny to serious and morbid. Overall the presentations were very entertaining. I agree with Sarah – time should be alloted for questions and comments from the class. We went to the end of the time period with presentations and so all questions had to be directed on an individual basis.
I went to a Closing the Generation Gap presentations that my seminar class worked on this semester. Although, I had heard the presentations before, we were given a shortened time length. I presented and was an audience member, and I really appreciated the extra time that we were given to present in addition to having time to discuss. We were able to present on what is going on today in terms of feminism. With this broad assignment, we presented on everything from feminist pornography and domestic discipline to presidential spouses to feminist magazines and online blogs.
I like how other faculty showed up to our presentation even though it made it a little more intimidating as a presenter. I feel like more students would enjoy all of the presentations, however, I know that having motivation to do so may be hard.
In response to Sarah and Caitlin, maybe a solution to not having time for discussion would be to break the creative writing session into two sessions. This seemed to work with my seminar class as it gave us enough time to present and discuss.
I attended several presentations dealing with linguistics, the first sessions I attended were individual projects, and I must say that the one that impressed me the most was certainly, a group project done by students on The Fredericksburg regional English Dialect Survey (Freds). First, What I really appreciated that other professors from other disciplines came to see the project, and there was even a couple of people from outside campus ( maybe because the topic was directly with Fredericksburg, I don’t know), But I think that the most varied the audience, the best it is.
The presentations were led very well , I think, And we had enough time after to discuss with the students, they could explained to us how they collected the Data for their project, and they shared the evolution of their project , the methodology they followed, which was very interesting. I think the Idea of the Symposium is very interesting, for it gives the students , more motivation to lead their work especially , I think for the Creative writing sessions, because as soon as you know that there will be an actual audience to your work , your writing is going to be different ( better, I think).
I attended the symposium topic on “Individual studies in Language, Discourse, and Social Interaction” @ 3:30 on Tuesday. I found this topic to be interesting and very relevant to things we have been talking about in class. One student presented research about how the rules of complimenting one another differ between society because of language barriers and pragmatics. Another student talked about her study of oral narrative in Berber society. She visited Morocco and studied the linguistics of storytellers in the Berber society. There was also research presented on how minority characters are represented in animated children’s shows. They spoke about how minority characters are usually less developed and often portrayed as less intelligent. All of the presentations were very interesting. I really enjoyed all the different individual studies on linguistics and communication. They were all very original and unique. The audience seemed very engaged and asked lots of questions after the presentations were finished.
I attended the Kemp Symposium session at 11 a.m. on Tuesday by the freshman seminar class who did a documentary on life at UMW. I really enjoyed the whole session – the class had clearly put a lot of time into the video. I know how long it took us to do a three minute mashup, so I can’t even imagine how many hours they spent making this documentary, but they did a great job.
What really worked in the presentation for me was how they showed the video in pieces and not just all the way through. This gave them the opportunity to discuss why they chose to include certain things (like footage of sports teams and students dissing Seaco) and why they didn’t include others (traditions like Devil Goat Day and Junior Ring Week weren’t included due to time constraints and due dates). I also liked that the kids kept the speeches before their section brief, because the video speaks for itself and they didn’t need to overstate anything.
After the video showed and the audience asked questions, the freshman who made the tape asked their own questions of the audience, which I think was smart because asking those questions tells them exactly what they need to do to make the documentary more rhetorically effective.
One more major thing that I liked was that the class encouraged the attendees to check out their website for the project and continue their involvement outside of the symposium. I already checked out the site, so their advertising was effective for me. Anytime you can get people to remember your presentation after it’s over is great.
As far as negatives, something that I feel could be done better for sessions like this one for next year would be to advertise it more – this session in particular wasn’t just something that English majors would care about, it wasn’t about some random poems or books that other majors might not necessarily be interested in. It was about being a student at UMW, which everyone on campus can relate to. I definitely feel like more people outside of the seminar class and the English dept. would have wanted to see that video debut, so maybe if a campus-wide email or lots of fliers were put out for these kinds of things next year, attendance would be even better.
Overall, I thought this was a really good part of the Symposium. It was definitely one of my favorite sessions and was ultimately rhetorically effective for me.
I attended the presentation by Amanda Bates on the “18th Century Restoration Drama: The Missing Prologues and Epilogues.” There were 7 people scheduled to go in the 50 minutes spot for 18th century drama, so I felt the speech was very rushed, and she didn’t have time to really give a lot of background information (and I have VERY little experience with 18th century drama, so I had a difficult time following the topic). I think for this reason, a powerpoint or some other form of visual aid would have been really helpful (although this may have been discouraged due to time constraints). There was only one faculty member present (that I was aware of), and probably under 14 people in the room (including the 7 presenters). I think a lot of this had to do with the choice of room (Combs 111 is back in an alcove that’s not easy to find), as well as the time-slot(many people are in class at 11:00 on a Monday).
I’m also somewhat confused as to what the purpose of the symposium is. Is this a presentation of senior thesis work? The presentation I viewed seemed very informal, quick, and had no time for questions and answers. It’s a bummer that these people put so much effort into their research and only had 7 minutes to share it with a very small group of people. I think it would be more appropriate to combine different subjects and have the symposium held in Dodd or somewhere that seems more formal.
I also attended the part of the symposium on restoration of 18th century drama. I agree with Cris that this seemed fairly rushed and since I didn’t have any context in which to understand the topics discussed, I felt somewhat lost. This is probably the nature of the program though. How could most audience members have a context to place this information in? I felt that the presentation style was appropriate given time constraints. It would have been nice to have more information and time allowed to each presenter, however. Maybe extending the amount of days that the symposium runs through would allow for more involved and informative presentations. Also, holding the questions till the end of everyone’s presentation in that time slot seemed distracting. If there was a presentation at the beginning of the section, its relevance and mind-set were forgotten by the end. By extending the days of the symposium and allowing questions (even a regulated time or amount of Q and A’a) at the end of each presentation would be helpful.
Another critique that I would give is that I was not aware of any other real advertising for this event. Were there fliers that I was just oblivious to? The only reason that I knew about it was because we were required to go. If the English department wishes to make this a m ore open and encompassing symposium then they could help that by making more efforts to inform the rest of the campus. Overall, I like that the English department does this and I think that it is nice to allow students to present their work to their peers and have recognition.
I went to the Generation Gap Part 2 presentations about feminism. All of the presentations were about if we still need feminist activity in today’s society or is it no longer necessary. Obviously all of the presentations came to the conclusion that feminism is still necessary.
The first presentation was about feminist pornography. In order for a pornography to be considered feminist in nature it has to meet three criteria: 1) women must be heavily involved in the making of the film, 2) it must depict female pleasure, 3) it is telling something new. They also talked about the difference between anti-porn feminists and sex-positive feminists.The students giving the presentation made a really awesome powerpoint and also had a video of them interviewing students on campus walk about what they thought feminist pornography was. Overall it was a really interesting presentation since it was about something I had never heard of and very well put together.
The other three presentations were about feminist blogs, domestic discipline (aka spanking in relationships), and the magazine “Bitch” which is a feminist response to pop culture. All the the presentations were well put together and very interesting. I enjoy learning more about feminism however I think anyone would have enjoyed the presentations because the topics were very current and mostly provocative. The class did a great job on making powerpoints that went along well with their presentations.
I went to the session on “Dissing Elizabeth” and heard three presentations on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I have never read his work but the three topics helped me understand the time period, Elizabeth as a queen, and societal expectations. I also presented a paper from my Tolkien seminar which was really fun to do. My concern with the symposium was that for both sessions the classrooms kept switching because of professors who hadn’t canceled class so the program classroom wasn’t the one we ended up presenting in. I think the symposium is a great idea but I wish that somehow it didn’t have to be as split up requiring choosing between two topics at the same time. Somehow it would be nice to have more of an audience because it always seems to be the presenters, the professor, and maybe a few friends. I was surprised and impressed that three non-related students came to my presentation but usually these are students who are required to go.
I attended the symposium session that took place on Monday at 2pm (“A Poet, A Lawyer, and Oscar Wilde Walk into Bar: Student Projects in the Department”). Even though the session was not organized around a single, unifying topic, I enjoying the diverse array of projects the students in the ELS dept. had completed.
The paper on the “American Comedic Voice” offered intersting insights into the paradoxical nature of comedy in the U.S., since the comedian is positioned as an outsider who both says what the audience wants to hear and violates their collective sense of propriety. As one of the comments after the presentations made clear, there was a nice sense of overlap between those ideas and the research another student did on Oscar Wilde. However, I wondered if that overlap then challenged the first speaker’s implicit claim that the position of the comic was distinctly American.
One of the other presentations was about the construction of the “Eighteenth-Century Audio” site. A group of students organized the site as a space where recordings of different poems can become available to the general public. I thought it was a great way to utilize technology to make literary studies more rewarding. Having struggled to understand Burns’s dialect more than once in my life, the thought of being able to visit a site to hear it performed in its correct accent makes me very happy. You should all visit the site!!
I also presented papers during two other sessions during the symposium. They were not very well attended, but the people who were there were very engaged with the presentations and the topics being discussed. I think that the symposium’s fluidity is one of its best features. People just come and go and drop in on sessions they think they might be interested in. By Tuesday, however, it seems like a lot of people were burned out. I don’t think there’s any way around it, but the symposium is kind of intense and having sessions where more than three people speak in a 50 minute block seems to wear spectators out faster.
I attended the 2:00 symposium on Monday. I thoroughly enjoyed Ben’s paper on the American Comedic Voice. As always, Ben delivered his speech with a lot of energy and kept the audience attentive. I also enjoyed the presentation about racial diversity on campus and UMW’s stance on the issue. Unfortunately, I felt like both of these presntations were rushed. Too many students trying to present in 50 minutes left the audience without time for real question and answer sessions.
Initially, I found the fact that there was no unifying theme tying these presentations together rather distracting. From reading Courtney’s post however, I’m assuming the majority of the otehr symposiums did have unifying themes?
Lastly, to make the symposium run better, prop open the doors to each classroom in between classes, encouraging students to pop their head in. I felt the closed doors left students feeling uninvited or intimidated to open the door to check for seating availability. All in all, I found the Kempt symposium to be a pretty neat concept.
I think that the best point I’ve read in these comments was to leave the doors propped open. When I was going around last week looking at presentations there were a few times where there were groups waiting awkwardly outside of classrooms wondering if they’re allowed into the class or not. We just want to be polite!
As someone who was presenting, the only problem I had was the amount of time I had. Ten minutes to go over my thesis felt wholly insufficient. At the same time, though, I can understand the audience’s fatigue, having been an audience member in other circumstances. Not to knock on anyone’s presentations, but certainly there hits a limit of the amount you want to hear about some topic that you’re not extremely excited or informed about (beyond the information provided).
I participated “The Fredericksburg Regional English Dialect Surbey(FREDS)” on Tuesday, April 22, led by Professor Fallon.In FREDS session, the students present a study about local accents of Fredericksburg residents which is progressing till now. It was interesting because the place of Fredericksburg is a kind of boundary not only between Piedmont and Tidewater, but also between Washington D.C which is represented the North, and Richmond which is represented the South.
They concentrated on the study of diphthong vowels /aj/ and /aw/. The both sounds has their own dialect allophones. However, the trend of those dialects is changed to almost standardization.
The study was in the process so they still need more study about it. They are doing very well thought, I think they need to more deep survey of the reason why standardization is happened. They found regional grounds, however, they didn’t care of the effects of Media, racial reason, education, social states, and gender etc. So far, they do very great job, and good presentation.
I attended the Long Poems portion of the ELS Symposium, in large part due to the fact that Dr. Scanlon was the one hosting the event. Either way, upon arriving I didn’t really know what to expect and I was actually rather surprised that all Dr. Scanlon did was introduce the speakers, all students. The first presentation was a group who detailed their work in posting a “Long Poem” page to wikipedia. They beamed at the thought of it being on the real internet not just a class site. It was interesting to see that kind of work done within the context of a class, I’m sure it took extensive work and it was fairly impressive that these students actually got this project done and accessible to the entire world, offering a brief synopsis of what they believe Long Poems to be.
The next portion of the event was simply three students sharing portions of the seminar class final papers with the audience. All in all it was rather unaccessible seeing as how I hadn’t read the material being discussed. I was surprised to notice that the room had a plenty of teachers in attendance but few students.
It was my first experience with the ELS symposium and it seemed strange that the event was held in a regular classroom, I would have thought they would at least warrant one of the large auditorium style rooms in combs.
I went to one that was talking about an online journal. I think it was ECOllective. Basically from what I gathered the students set up different sections of the website for online submissions in different fields of literature and even art I think. The concept was interesting, it made me wonder about the difference between the numbers of physical journals and magazines circulating versus hits on a website. This in turn leads me to wonder the actual amount that people read of a text be it printed or on a computer screen, like if you had two of the exact same document distributed to x amount of people in print and online and were able to record how much was actually read of each that might be interesting. Random thought.
I attended “A Poet, A Lawyer, and Oscar Wilde Walk into Bar: Student Projects in the Department.” I have to agree with previous comments about the logistics of the Kemp Symposium. Ten minute presentations are extremely short. When reducing my presentation from a 25 page paper to a ten minute presentations I found it hard to strike a balance between keeping to the time, while not generalizing my paper too significantly.
I really enjoyed Ben’s presentation on the “Comedic Voice.” He was the most engaging speaker at our session. He explained that although he was talking about comedy, his presentation was dry, but I disagree, he really livened up the room and made it very interesting. I’m sure it was also hard for him to stick to ten minutes, with a topic like comedy. In a room full of people who don’t recognize a lot of the names he was referencing, I’m sure there was just not enough time to give background information.
I found the “Oscar Wilde” presentation very hard to follow. The speaker had very little eye contact with the audience. The lack of PowerPoint during a ten minute presentation, can really only be pulled off with an extremely engaging speaker. I found it hard to figure out some of the points he was trying to make, and really didn’t even know when to laugh at the things that the rest of the room was laughing at.
I attended a few of the presentations during KEmp Symposium. I especially enjoyed attending my English 447 Seminar classes presentations of our final papers. I had already heard these presentations, but what was nice was seeing how the papers had changed in the past weeks. We presented the papers in class and gave eachother suggestions and seeing how each person took the suggestions and used them to enhance their papers was great. I really enjoyed this because usually we don’t get to hear the final product and through Kemp Symposium I got to. I really enjoyed seeing how people compared the literature and how it was done to the Cult of Elizabeth. Although this presentation was early in the morning, I really enjoyed attending it.
I attended the 11 am session which was the session from the class English 447, Restoration drama. I thought it was very interesting because I had never been to the symposium before and didn’t know that each class held a session. I liked that it was done by class that way each presentation was similar in a way and it was easier for me to follow. A couple presentations were about women controlling men in different ways, such as manipulation. There was another presentation on deception and disguise and a third on the differences between comedies and tragedies in regards to their epilogues.
Im not really sure how you could make it better except to make it more well know outside of Combs, then there might be a bigger audience and the presenters would feel better about having to present because they are actually presenting to people.