The Graduate English Association will host the Eighth Annual Symposium featuring the research of our English graduate students on April 8th, 2022 from 2-3:30 p.m. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Real and Imagined Places” and our faculty respondent will be Dr. Laura McGrath. All are welcome to attend the virtual event using this link: https://temple.zoom.us/j/99710472284.
Learn more about this year’s panelists below:
Matthew Soderblom, "Strangers on the Prairie: Comparing Johannes B. Wist and Johan Bojer’s Depictions of Midwestern Towns"
Matthew Soderblom is a Ph.D. candidate in Temple University’s English Department. He currently teaches English 0802 in the First Year Writing program. Specializing in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American Literature, his research interests include concepts of the frontier, immigrant literatures, indigenous literatures, issues of modernity, madness, realism, naturalism, modernism, and the psychological effects of environmental issues. His dissertation explores the relationship between madness and American frontier literature.
SaraGrace Stefan, "Brazen Women, Pointy Teeth, and the Necessity of Female Community: Female Relationships, Female Betrayal, and the American Gothic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Paradise (1997), and Love (2003)"
SaraGrace Stefan is a third-year PhD student in Temple’s English literature program, where she is studying 20th/21st century American literature. She is particularly interested in the revised American Gothic tradition and its intersections with gender and race. While at Temple, SaraGrace has enjoyed teaching Analytical Reading and Writing, Detective Novels, and Shakespeare in the Movies in almost every format imaginable. In her spare time, SaraGrace works as an administrative and technological assistant for her church historian father. Originally from New Jersey, she now lives in Cedar Park, Philadelphia with her dog, Socks.
Eric Funk, "Through the Surface to the Depths: Virginia Woolf’s'The Window'and Henri Bergson’s Duration"
Eric Funk is currently an MA student in the English Department at Temple University, as well as
an MLA student at the University of Pennsylvania. Broadly, his research interests include the
aesthetic and narrative features of the novel form, particularly since the modernist period, as
well as the contemporary literary marketplace. He received his BA in History and Political
Science from Penn State and his JD from Northwestern University. Before matriculating to
Temple, he was an attorney in Delaware, specializing in corporate governance. In addition to his
research and classwork, Eric enjoys traveling with his wife, toddler, and two English bulldogs.
Nick Cialini, "Utopia’s Foul-Smelling Cellar: Utopian Closure and the Complicity of Citizen-Soldiersin Ursula K. LeGuin’s'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas'"
Nick Cialini is a fourth year PhD candidate in Temple University’s Graduate English Literature Program where he is working on his dissertation, tentatively titled Surviving in the World-Machine: Power and Resistance in Outsider Speculative Fiction. He is the Graduate Student Representative on the Council for Play and Game Studies (CFPGS). He has presented at the International Hemingway Society Conference and NEMLA. He is the author of a chapter in the forthcoming book The Hapless Father Trope in Cartoons for Adults, and his poetry can be in the Winter 2021 edition of Philadelphia Stories.