Lunch

Campus Center Gym

12:00-1:15 PM

Lunch is provided for URC presenters, their faculty advisors, and guests. Lunch may be eaten on site or taken away in boxes.

Award Presentations and Keynote Address

Welcome Remarks from Dr. Carolyn Dehner, Dean of Academic Affairs

Feigenbaum Scholar Awards 2023-2024

Salimatu Bah, Charles Darling, Emily Downing, Alexander Miller, Maia Rice, Ryan Taylor, Sophie Tannenbaum

The Feigenbaum Scholars at MCLA are innovators in their discipline, whose research projects enhance their academic work and career prospects. Annually, the MCLA Innovation Fund by the Feigenbaum Foundation supports the MCLA Feigenbaum Scholars, who are chosen on the merits of their proposal and on their contribution to existing or new research. The Feigenbaum Scholars are required to present their research at the MCLA Undergraduate Research Conference and are encouraged to present their research regionally and nationally.

Keynote Address: Deven Philbrick, '16

Deven Philbrick is a writer of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. His work in all three genres is influenced by process studies, a broad field of inquiry encompassing several academic disciplines unified by the recognition that the inherent dynamism of all things is ontologically prior to what Western philosophy has tended to think of as the things themselves. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, he is at work upon a dissertation entitled From Being to Becoming, From Text to Writing: Process Metaphysics in the Poetry of Williams, Olson, Duncan, and Mackey, in which he investigates how this quartet of poets was influenced by process philosophy, and mobilizes those findings toward re-imagining aspects of our critical practice. Drawing on the ideas of such thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead and Édouard Glissant, the project proposes a model of literary interpretation that neither reduces the written arts to their socio-histories, nor figures them as metaphysically Other. Philbrick's scholarship proceeds from the supposition that critics must expand the range of imaginative possibilities literary works offer, rather than explaining them away as either ideology or craft. His debut poetry collection, Snow Drifts, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. He holds a BA in English/Communications and Philosophy from MCLA, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, and is completing his PhD at the University of Michigan.

Meet with Deven Philbrick '16, Keynote Speaker (Freel Library)