Harmon-Bickley Travel Fund supports Literature, Media, and Culture graduate students' research and conference attendance

By Matthew Garrett

Attending academic conferences and presenting research is an essential experience for graduate students. Late in the Fall 2023 semester, five Florida State University scholars represented the English-Literature, Media, and Culture Program at various conferences around the country.

First-year Master of Arts students Charlotte Alcon, Tyler “Ty” Blackerby, and Arhaba Waseem presented their work at the 120th-annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference in Portland, Oregon. Second-year Master of Arts student Emma Bruce attended the Midwest Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association conference in Chicago. And doctoral candidate Daniel Raschke presented his paper at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Brooklyn, New York.

Each student offered their honed research findings and analysis through presentations, offering insights and forging bonds with other conference attendees. Harmon-Bickley Travel and Research Grants assisted the LMC students in the opportunities to present their work.

“As a program, we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity the donors have provided our graduate students, and we are always looking for ways to expand those opportunities further,” says English Associate Professor Robert Stilling, who also is director of the LMC Program.

The Harmon-Bickley Travel Fund derives its name, in part, from Griffith T. Pugh Professor Emeritus of English Bruce Bickley. Bickley is a former FSU professor who retired in 2004 but continues to teach on a part-time basis. Hugh Harmon and his wife, Maryhelen, first founded the initial endowments. Hugh Harmon was a distinguished dentist in Tampa, and Maryhelen Harmon was a decorated and well-respected professor of literature at the University of South Florida. (Read more about the Harmons here.)

The three lifelong learners believed every student should be able to pursue their dreams in the realm of academia; for qualified students, this award can be of significant assistance.

“LMC faculty are really proud of the hard work our students have put into these conference presentations and we’re happy that we have some funding to provide,” says English Professor Candace Ward, who was the LMC Program director last fall. “They are forging paths and building scholarly community in ways that they, too, will remember for a long, long time.”

Anyone interested in contributing to graduate student research in the Literature, Media, and Culture Program can contact Stilling directly.

 

Charlotte Alcon: presentation at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference

Alcon says she particularly enjoyed the networking aspect of the PAMLA conference, where she presented two different papers on separate panels. In one, she looked at bisexual representation in literature, choosing to discuss bisexual erasure and biphobia in a paper titled “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the Two Problems with Bisexual Literature.”

In another roundtable discussion, she contributed to the cultural response to the COVID-19 pandemic through her paper “Attitudes in Don DeLillo’s White Noise in Conversation With America’s Early Pandemic Response.” Alcon noticed that the worldwide health scare that began in early 2020 was still a prominent issue for the scholars in attendance.

“There was definitely a lot of pandemic literature at the conference,” she says. “I think that it all lined up perfectly with the event’s theme, which was ‘Shifting Perspectives.’ I’m confident that when people heard the theme, that the pandemic was the first thing their minds thought of.”

 

Tyler “Ty” Blackerby: presentation at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference

Blackerby also participated in multiple panels at the PAMLA conference. She was part of one called “The Holocaust in Literature, Media, and Film II,” where she delivered her paper “An Extended Annotated Bibliography of Children’s Holocaust Literature.” The panel she spoke on was the second session on the topic.

“The first session was equally as fascinating, and I was quite interested in Dr. Craig Smith’s paper titled ‘Counterfactual Optimism and the Holocaust,’” Blackerby says. “Dr. Smith highlighted the fact that American media and narratives about the Holocaust tend to be, as his title suggests, counterfactually optimistic. That is, there is always a ‘bright side’ or a ‘happy ending’ or ‘lesson learned’ at the end of American Holocaust narratives. As somebody interested in the ways that the Holocaust continuously reappears as the catalyst for many popular culture narratives, his insights were incredibly intriguing.”

 

Emma Bruce: presentation at the Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference

Bruce considers the work they presented at the 2023 Midwest Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association conference to be an early iteration of their capstone project. A former classical ballet dancer, Bruce chose to analyze the intersection of celebrity and dance with a paper titled “Reality Redemption: Dancing with the Stars and the ‘Higher Truth’ of Embodied Performance.”

They found that the work appeared to be breaking new ground.

“(Dance on reality TV) hasn’t received much critical attention; there is a ‘Real Housewives’ type of show that involves ballroom dancers that I’m also looking into exploring,” Bruce says, adding that the prospect of celebrities reframing their image through dance is fascinating.

Bruce presented on the lone reality TV panel at the conference and took advantage of networking with others scholars with their research interests. One particular panel from the event stuck in Bruce's mind, however: “There was a LARPing panel,” they recall, “and that was great,” referring to live action role-playing games.

 

Daniel Raschke: presentation at the Modernist Studies Association conference

Raschke has previous experience in conferencing: he previously presented papers at the New Voices and Southern Studies conferences. Already a decorated scholar, Raschke is a recipient of the Elliot Butt Loyless Doctoral Fellowship, was awarded a German Academic Exchange Service stipend, and won a Hans Galinsky Memorial Prize.

At the Modernist Studies Association conference, Raschke chaired a panel called “Precarious Archives,” where he presented his paper titled “Precarious Imperceptibility: Entropy and Obfuscation in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.” He says he particularly enjoyed a panel on “noise poetics,” where he considered the resulting conversation particularly productive.

 

Arhaba Waseem: presentation at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference

Waseem describes her experience as eye-opening and immensely helpful as a first-time conference experience. Though relatively experienced in studying her area of emphasis, Waseem enjoyed the experience in a new place while networking with like-minded scholars.

“The opportunity to go out west was amazing, and I loved to see how it differed from here,” Waseem says. “I am just immensely grateful to FSU’s Literature, Media, and Culture faculty and the Harmon-Bickley Foundation for supporting me and getting me to that point.”

Her research interests include the transnational political economy of media and its gender politics, post-colonial literature, and gender studies, so she felt right at home in her panel about the private and political spheres of women in the Muslim world. The paper she presented was titled “Making the Personal Political through Herstory in Rafia Zakaria’s The Upstairs Wife,” and she is looking forward to her next opportunity to attend a conference.

 

Ward was the common link between the students and the awards. Conferencing is critical to the professionalization of graduate students, she says, and all LMC students are invited to apply for the funding.

She advises students to be realistic and pragmatic in their expectations when searching for these opportunities. Not every application is accepted, and a school-conference balance must be met for interested students.

Ultimately, Ward says, conferences offer scholars an excellent resource for feedback and networking that can quickly introduce students to the professional world.

Alcon, Blackerby, Waseem, Bruce, and Raschke say they all learned valuable lessons from their conference experiences, and each student has ambitions to participate again in the near future. In the coming years, the Harmon-Bickley Travel Foundation will send even more of FSU English’s brightest minds to conferences across the country.

Matthew Garrett graduated from FSU in December 2023 with his English degree on the editing, writing, and media track, with a minor in anthropology.

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