News

Six English students from the Lee University Department of Language and Literature recently presented at the Marco Undergraduate Conference and the Southeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature (SECCL). The presenting students were English majors Don Carpenter, Kyle Carrasco, Karen Chambless, Mackenzie Oberndorfer, Kaitlyn Smith and Bethany Wood.

Carpenter and Oberndorfer presented at the Third Annual Marco Undergraduate Conference, titled, “Corpus: the Body in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” Hosted by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the Marco Center, the conference drew its speakers from students across the eastern United States.

Carpenter and Oberndorfer presented papers derived from their Shakespeare course taken at Lee in the fall of 2012. Carpenter’s paper was titled, “King Lear: Isolating the Individual between Love and Power,” and Oberndorfer presented “‘Heavenly music to work mine end’: How Music Prospers Morality in The Tempest.”

Oberndorfer, along with Carrasco, Chambless, Smith, and Wood, also presented at the Southeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature hosted by Covenant College.

The SECCL invited the submission of papers exploring the relevance of Christian faith for 20th-century literature and the relevance of 20th-century literature for Christian faith. The conference permits undergraduate submissions but is more geared towards graduate students or professors. Of the 25 presenters, there were eight undergraduates, five of whom were from Lee.

Dr. Chad Schrock, an assistant professor of English at Lee, accompanied the students on both trips as faculty sponsor and also presented.

“A highlight of the SECCL for me was getting to read on a panel with two of my former students, Bethany and Mackenzie,” said Schrock. “They made me work to keep up with them.”

Carrasco presented his paper, titled, “Edgar’s Gift of Tongues: The Legacy of Christ in King Lear”; Chambless presented “A Tradition of Corruption: The Effect of Generational Sin in Absalom, Absalom!”; Oberndorfer, “The Hermeneutics of ‘A Very Old Man’s’ Miracles”; Smith, “God Forbade It Indeed, but Faustus Hath Done It: Faustus’s Sympathetic Rebellion”; and Wood, “The Summoner’s Tale: Windy Whimsy, or Pious Presentation?”

 
Pictured above (left to right) are Kaitlyn Smith, Kyle Carrasco, Dr. Schrock, Bethany Wood, Mackenzie Oberndorfer and Karen Chambless at the Southeast Regional Conference of Christianity and Literature.