On Saturday, November 22 (2:00–4:10 pm), join us for the Undergraduate Student Forum, a special gathering under the theme Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion. This event will take place in InterContinental Ballroom A (5th floor) at the InterContinental San Francisco.
Guided by presiding officers Alexa Barger (UCLA), Alan Yeh (UC Berkeley), and Iliana Cuellar (UC Riverside), with chairs Jan Maramot Rodil (UC Irvine) and Summer Lizer (Claremont Graduate University), this forum highlights the range and vitality of undergraduate scholarship.
Presentations will explore topics as varied as early medieval politics, modernist poetics, and the lived experiences of migration. Other papers turn to cultural memory in music, interrogations of gender roles, and the emerging influence of generative AI on fan cultures. Students also take up questions of rhetoric, chaos, and failure through the lenses of glitch theory and television storytelling.
Featured talks include:
- Titus McTavish (CSU Fresno), The Holy North: A Critical Evaluation of the Synod of Whitby and the Following Political Landscape of Northumbria
- Chutian Shi (UCLA), Translating Grief, Fracturing Selves: Ito Shizuo’s Elegies to My Beloved (1935) and Its Rilkean Poetics
- Alivia Radovich (Troy University), There’s No Place Like Home: The Palimpsestic Identity in Migrant Journeys
- Nathan Drago (Irvine Valley College), A Musical Retrospective on U.S. History
- Leah Gibson (CSU San Marcos), A Life in Patriarchal Chains: The Tradwife Phenomenon
- Audrey Lin (UC Santa Barbara), The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Fanfiction and Fandom Discourses
- Ellis Sinclair (University of Maine), Il0: Glitch Trickster, Parabody, and the Rhetoric of Chaos
- Alexandria Austin (Independent Scholar), “One Day You’re Gonna Look Around and Realize You Don’t Have Anybody”: BoJack’s Consequences of Failed Relationships
Bringing together students from institutions across the country, the Undergraduate Forum embodies PAMLA’s commitment to fostering new voices, celebrating diverse approaches, and highlighting the ways memory and oblivion shape cultural and critical inquiry.