Panels & Presentations

Ron Hoag was one of four presenters to honor Thoreau scholar (and former ECU colleague) Bradley P. Dean at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, Massachusetts.  At 12:45 pm on Saturday, July 8, 2006, a "Remembrance for Bradley P. Dean" was held in the First Parish Church in Concord, Massachusetts.  On Sunday, July 9, 2006, an informal gathering also took place at Thoreau's beanfield, where a granite marker was newly installed.  Brad Dean correctly located the beanfield in his 2005 article which appeared in The Concord Saunterer.  For a complete text of the article, please see:  http://www.bradleypdean.com/research_writings/Bean_Field_Article.pdf

Dean also edited two of Thoreau's previously unpublished book-length manuscripts: "The Dispersion of Seeds" (in Faith in a Seed, Island Press, 1993) and Wild Fruits (Norton, 2000). He also edited Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (Norton, 2004), a collection of letters Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake over the course of thirteen years.  For brief excerpts from each of these books, please see: http://www.bradleypdean.com/media/

Judy Clark presented "Borders of the Mind," at the University of Missouri-Columbia's 15th Annual EGSA Conference on February 17-18, 2006.  The theme of the conference was "Cues and Clues: How Texts Construct the Life of the Mind."  According to Clark, "My paper was fit into the Perspectives on Ethnic and Multicultural Texts category of the conference. This essay looked at border theory through the literary works of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands, Sherman Alexie's The Business of Fancydancing, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Because the borderland experience is a unique situation that entraps an individual to that contained area -- mentally, emotionally, culturally and often times physically, the search for or re-establishing a cultural identity and/or an individual identity has become a major theme in Native American and Chicano literature. This essay attempts to reveal the way border writers reshape identity behind borders."

Julie Fay read from her work at the 29th annual Festival Franco-Anglais de Poesie, June 16-18, on the Place St. Sulpice. While in France, she also collaborated with Jeannie Thompson, Director of the Alabama Writers Forum, and Carol Smith-Rosenberg, feminist historian from University of Michigan, on a panel discussing women in medieval times.

Christy Baker presented "A Feminist, Philosophical, and Sociological Examination of the Use of Conjure in Sula" at the International Conference on the Arts in Society held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, on August 17.  Baker says, "In the paper, I explore how Toni Morrison's use of conjure raises cosmic questions of good and evil and proves to be a source of empowerment for some of the female characters in the novel.  Conjure determines how the people in Morrison's fictional world treat each other and themselves, and in so doing, exposes religious hypocrisy that contributes to the often-hostile environment in which Sula finds herself living."

Reginald Watson presented "The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Womanhood and Manhood in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Alice Walker's Third Life of Grange Copeland" at the Durham Recreation and Parks on June 17, 2006, and at Tryon Palace, New Bern, on July 20, 2006.  The presentation was podcast on the Tryon Palace website and aired on New Bern's Channel 10.  Both presentations were sponsored by the NC Humanities Council.