This conference showcases the rich array of original research projects undertaken by students in the 2025-26 Townsend Honors Thesis Workshop.

The workshop supports and guides undergraduate students writing honors theses on topics in the arts and humanities. Led by Townsend Center director Stephen Best and PhD student Sylvie Thode, the workshop explores aspects of the research and writing processes, and provides a forum for students from a variety of fields to give and receive feedback on their work.

Conference Schedule

9:45–10 am: Welcome

10–11:15: Who We Are(n’t): The Role of Narrative in Constructing Identity
This panel examines various works of global narrative prose that negotiate what it means to be, both as an individual and as a collective.

• Vasaki Mahesan (South & Southeast Asian Studies), Inherited War: Political Memory and Diasporic Identity in Contemporary Eelam Tamil Novels
• Lucille Lorenz (Comparative Literature), The Undivine Comedy: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke
• Daphne Rose (Comparative Literature), "The Small Animal": Autofiction and Trauma in Vidgis Hjorth's If Only
• Angelina Rosete (English), The Political Imaginary and Performance: The Great Gatsby through Adaptations
• Alexandra Raphling (Comparative Literature), Hysteria in The Brothers Karamazov: How Faith Redefines Dostoevsky’s Modern Russia

11:15–11:30 am: Coffee Break

11:30–12:45: Dominance and Dimensions: Exploring Spatial Narrative and Production
This panel explores various forms of spatial production and reception, intervening in dominant spatial narratives to propose new accounts of how space operates.

• Anjali Pajjuri (English), What is a Prison Poem? Carceral Logics and the Attica Rebellion of 1971
• Charlie Kim-Worthington (Ancient Greek & Roman Studies), Redesigning Antiquity: Ancient Architectures of Disability and Access in Lindos, Rhodes
• Sarah Chapman (History of Art), “Roy naughty. Spoilt plate”: The Blurred Boundaries between Linley Sambourne’s Artistic Practices, Labor, and Life
• Solenne Bideau (Rhetoric), “The Growing Desert”: The Material and Discursive Production of Paradigmatic Imaginaries
• Xiaonan Ren (History of Art), Dependencies Across Dimensions: The Social Production of Colonial School Space in German Qingdao (1898-1914)

12:45–1:30 pm: Lunch

1:30–2:30: Corpus/Corps: Plurality, Translation, and the Body
This panel considers issues of translation and plurality as they pertain to literary, artistic, and devotional accounts of the body.

• Ava Ratcliff (Ancient Greek & Roman Studies), Urnomorphic? Ecological Ecphrasis in Catullus 64
• Bella Dunn (French), Re-writing the Feminine Body: Fragmentation, Plurality, and the Body-Text
• Hannia Paola Jauregui Torres (History of Art), The Sensorium of Devotion: Touch, Sight, and the Rosary in Early Modern Italy
• Georgia Sisco (Comparative Literature), Re-visioning in the Plural: Textual Bodies Across Rich and Brossard

2:30–2:45 pm: Break

2:45–4 pm: Mediating the Nation: Contextual Approaches to Cultural Production
This panel explores multimedia objects and their political lives across cultural and national contexts. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the panel questions the role of media in the production of national and cultural identity.

• Gavin Garza (English), Sweet Chin Music: How Storytelling in Professional Wrestling Unmasks America
• Jake St. Clair (Film & Media), Fields of Extraction: The Political Economy of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
• Daniela Alvarez (Comparative Literature), How Women Feel Their Way into Liberation: Exploring Radical Imagination in Latin American Decolonial Poetry
• Rorie Howard (English), The Great Vanishing Act: Indigenous (In)Visibility in Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Alejandra Lopez Guadarrama (History of Art), Fragments of the Pacific: Ming Porcelain, from Global Commodity to Local Ritual