The Department of English is hosting its Senior Showcase to display the English students’ senior research presentations. These presentations will take place from 2:00 – 4:00 PM on Tuesday, April 26, in Room 229 of the Stone Center.

Maranda Cannon’s “The Power of Adaptation: A Comparison of Homeric and Modern Characters” will close read and analyze Briseis of Homer’s The Iliad and Thetis of Madeline Miller’s recent adaptation, The Song of Achilles, to compare the two main female characters and how their portrayal serves each of the works.

Dacey Dunnaway’s project will analyze Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov with an examination of Dostoevsky’s representation of the meaning of life and his criticism of nihilism in these novels; her presentation is titled “Dostoevsky’s Response to Nihilism: A Defense of the Meaning of Life.”

Katelyn Miskelley will be presenting “Writing Centers and the ‘Virtual Campus’: A Study into How Digital Media Presence Impacts Student Involvement with the Jacksonville State University Writing Center.” In this research project, Miskelley examines how the JSU English Department Writing Center uses digital media as a marketing tool to increase student involvement. User research methods (surveys and user testing) were implemented by Miskelley to show the correlation between a digital media presence and student engagement.

Amanda Manual will analyze how the Harry Potter series shows us that no one is all good or all bad, as we are all humans who can make good and bad choices in her presentation “Light and Darkness.”

John Butoric will read his short story “Brittle Little Stones” afterwards, as part of the student reading in the Merrill Hall Auditorium at 4:30 PM. In his story, Butoric writes of “a non-human entity exploring a human ruin and examining the society that was left behind in the wake of humanity’s self-destructive nature. From this perspective (and in a slow-drip style of classic sci fi giants like Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. LeGuin) we get a different perspective of the human experience of a complete outsider piecing together what was lost.”