McKena Miyashiro |
Though some students may take an adventure to downtown Portland or grab a cup of coffee at Cathedral Coffee to step outside the UP bubble, it’s not often that UP students are able to share their ideas or showcase their work in the greater Pacific Northwest community. For the past 11 years, however, the Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature (NUCL) has broke this bubble right on campus by inviting all undergraduates in the Pacific Northwest to share and discuss their writing.
On Saturday, April 5, UP hosted the eleventh annual Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature (NUCL) in Franz Hall. NUCL gives students an opportunity to present their own papers or creative works to a panel of their peers for discussion.
Sophomore Hope Dorman, an English major, worked as a respondent last year to help moderate discussion on scholarly papers or creative works submitted to NUCL. This year, Dorman submitted her own essay to NUCL and was selected to present her paper at the conference.
"While it's great to share within your own English department, nothing's greater than discussing your work with a stranger that is also educated in the same field as you," Dorman said.
Dorman's essay discussed women's oppression in the context of the book “Season of Migration to the North” by Tayeb Salih. This work takes place in Sudan in the 1960s and touches upon different elements of oppression within Islamic culture.
"I'm a super-feminist and this issue was very apparent in the novel, so it was cool to analyze and pick out all the pieces of something that's really important to me," Dorman said.
Senior Jonathan Cruz, an education and English major, chose to submit a short story about his home back in Hawaii.
Cruz's essay discussed his personal experiences about what home really means to him and the economic limits of Hawaii that people outside of the island don’t often realize.
“I wanted to be published and I think that NUCL is a great way for undergraduates to be published. It’s difficult as an undergrad to be recognized for work, and NUCL is a great way to realize that our works are greater than ourselves and that our works actually matter to other people,” Cruz said.
Aside from presenting papers and listening to papers written by their peers, students are invited to attend NUCL’s keynote speakers who are distinguished in the field of literature. NUCL was sponsored by the English department, the Provost's Office, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Dean of Admissions, and the University of Portland as a whole. Submissions for NUCL ran between Dec. 1, 2013 to Jan. 20, 2014 and English professors Sarah Weiger and Genevieve Brassard were co-chairs for this conference.
