Fairmont State’s Department of Language and Literature will host this year’s West Virginia Undergraduate Literary Symposium on February 29, according to Nathan Myers, Associate Professor of English and one of the organizers of this year’s symposium.
The Symposium will welcome 18 students from Concord, Marshall, Shepherd, West Liberty, and Fairmont State University. The students will present papers they have written for their literature classes. Their topics range from the Bible to works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, J.K. Rowling, and David Foster Wallace, as well as 20th-century poetry.
Two Fairmont State Honors students will participate. Bailey D. McInturff, a junior from Beckley, will read “‘Her Heart Might Last’: Margery Kempe and the Patriarchy.” Laura Morris, a senior from Fairmont, will present “C.S. Lewis and the Simulacra: Questions of Truth and Morality,” which she wrote as part of her Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship last summer.
“Students from all over our state continue to undertake exciting research projects, and it is always a delight to host the symposium in Fairmont,” Myers said.
Dr. Angela Schwer, Chair of Language and Literature added the symposium allows the students the opportunity to shine both professionally and personally.
“Experience presenting at the Symposium is excellent preparation for graduate school and professional life,” she said. “The fact that our students are consistently chosen to present is a tribute to our dedicated and engaging English faculty.”
The West Virginia Undergraduate Literary Symposium began at West Virginia University in 1992. Fairmont State University hosted the Symposium in 2012 and again in 2018.
