March 04, 2008
Bowling
Green, Ky. - Several Western Kentucky University students and faculty members will make presentations March 19-22 at the 2008 Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations in San Francisco.
Three students and two faculty members will participate in a panel titled “Unconventional Approaches to the American Dream.”
The presentations, which grew out of an American Studies course taught by English faculty member Dr. Ted Hovet and history faculty member Dr. Tony Harkins, include Mattea Carver of Glasgow, “Ruling in Favor of the American Dream: John Marshall’s Intentional Use of the Judicial Branch to Promote Economic Prosperity”; Sara Herndon of Hopkinsville, “Edie Sedgwick: A Portrait of an Unconventional American Dream”; WKU graduate Emily Gibson of Hodgenville, “Freedom in the Skies!: Female Aviators and the (En)gendering of the American Dream.” Dr. Hovet and Dr. Harkins also will participate in the panel.
Three students will participate in a panel on“Visual and Aural Rhetoric in Shakespeare Adaptations,” chaired by English Department head Dr. Karen Schneider. The students make up the first all undergraduate panel featured at the conference.
The presentations, which grew out of a Shakespeare on Film course, include Mason Broadwell of Dunwoody, Ga., “Thy Vice is Music: Music as Rhetoric in Shakespeare Film”; Robert Deignan of Louisville, “War and Image: Branagh’s and Olivier’s Battle of Agincourt”; Brooke Shafar of Taylorsville, “The Audience’s Moral Dilemma in ‘Richard III’: Richard as Sympathetic Character.”
WKU student Lydia Nelson of Carver, Mass., will participate in a panel on “Popular Culture in the Age of Theodore Roosevelt.” Her presentation, written for Dr. Harkins’ History of American Popular Culture course, is titled “Bicycle Built for Two: A Democratized Sport’s Craze Spinning Standards of Sexuality and the Woman’s Sphere.”
Three other WKU faculty members also will participate in the conference. Marjorie L. Yambor, broadcasting instructor, will chair a session on “Animation and Real Life?”; Eric Bain-Selbo, head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, will present “Sport as the New ‘Opiate of the Masses’: College Football in the American South”; Marie Guthrie, English instructor, will present “Heinlein vs. God: Heinlein’s Job vs. the Biblical Job.”
More information about the 2008 Joint Conference of the National Popular Culture and American Culture Associations is available online at www.pcaaca.com.
More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
For information, contact Karen Schneider at (270) 745-3043.
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