MALS story
Five MALS Students Represent Reed at Stanford's 2018 GLS Symposium
It's a little nerve-wracking standing before an audience of your intellectual peers, but the GLS symposium is a very collegiate environment. This was my fourth one in a row to attend. I get a kick out of the nerdiness of the whole event, the excitement around intellectual discourse, and the diversity of attendees, most of whom are incredibly friendly and welcoming.
—Derek Finn, MALS Student and Presenter
This June, Reedies Meg Cook, Derek Finn, Claire Michie, Libby O’Neil, and Mike Schock travelled to the Stanford campus in Palo Alto to share their work and support scholars from 8 West Coast schools at the 2018 Graduate Liberal Studies Symposium (GLS). The Stanford campus with its inspiring buildings and beautiful grounds offered a fitting backdrop to this forum for exploring ideas. But as always it was the GLS participants themselves that made the weekend a rewarding one, offering deeply-researched scholarship as well as a supportive and inquisitive audience for presentations ranging from current societal challenges to studies of ancient texts.
Three of the Reed presenters, Meg, Libby and Mike, also will publish their papers in the 2018 GLS online journal Western Tributaries in December. A first-time presenter, Meg's paper on "America's Poshlust Vacuum: Understanding Commodity Fetishism, the Young-Girl, and the Role of the Artist in Nabokov's Lolita" also won the AGLSP national writing award. (Read her paper here.) Libby’s paper “Wedding (and Divorcing) the Brides of Christ” examined the martial discourse surrounding women religious during the Reformation. She argues that their status was linked to earthly marriage and thus can explain both the highly contested elimination of the convent in Protestant areas, as well as the drastically heighted focus on public vows, convent enclosure, and class-exclusivity in Catholic areas. Another first-time presenter, Mike wrote his paper on “Basic Structures of Ideological Communication in Traditional Hollywood Feature Film Narratives.” He argues that these films play a significant role in the framing and reframing of socio-cultural systems of belief, and provide qualitative statements on the values, ideas, and beliefs that inform human thought and behavior in relation to predominant ideologies of Western culture.
Derek and Lynette were the seasoned presenters, having attended the GLS symposium for several years. Derek's paper on "Émigré Identity in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin" used Nabokovian literary themes of memory and time, perception and reflection, mirroring and doubling, and the resilient individuality of the artist and intellectual to explore the nature of émigré identity. He argued that the émigré experience mimics that of the extraterritorial artist who struggles as an outsider in his own world. Through the lenses of feminist theory, postmodern cinema theory, and media studies remediation theory, Lynette posited in her paper, "Sita Sings the Blues," that the 2009 animated film writes a new mythology that posits "a woman like me" as deity and creator.
If a weekend of academic scholarship and camaraderie sounds appealing, consider representing Reed at the next GLS, being held at St. John's College Santa Fe June 7-9, 2019. A call for papers will come out in early Spring 2019; all students and alumni are welcome to attend!