Honors students win awards and standing ovation at Md. Honors conference

Honors Program students won three prizes and a standing ovation with History professor and program director Bryn Upton at the Maryland Collegiate Honors Conference March 3-4. Madelyn Jackstadt earned a prize for best poster, while Mable Buchanan and Christina DeJoseph won prizes for best abstracts.

Buchanan, a junior English major from Westminster, Md., closed her presentation, “Rue Morgue Gone Rogue: Poe, an Information Revolution, and the Real Life American Sensation Tale,” with a rap she composed. She brought the house down and earned a standing ovation.

“Fortunately, I had an Edgar Allan Poe rap prepared already because writing silly raps is a hobby of mine and because it focuses on him from a biographical perspective,” she says. “I just saved my expository background information for the end. I know it’s not a very traditional thing to do but I’m very glad I did it.”

Learning about research on a wide variety of topics from other Maryland honors students was the highpoint of the conference for Buchanan, whose presentation was the result of research conducted with English professor Robert Kachur.

“The research argued that Poe purposefully employed literary remix to reclaim the sensation tale, which I suggest he viewed as a sort of renegade Romanticism that had strayed from what he considered ‘legitimate literature,’” Buchanan says. She explained that she thought it would be a meta-presentational joke to employ a remix in the unexpected genre of rap right after she presented that Poe used remix in the unexpected genres of short story and novel.

McDaniel College Honors students presenting at the conference:

• Christian Alberg, a senior English major from Mount Pleasant, S.C.
“‘I Wanted You to be Conscious’: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ‘Between the World and Me’ as a Revision of James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’”

• Mable Buchanan, a junior English and Music major from Westminster, Md. – Winner of a Prize for Best Abstract
“Rue Morgue Gone Rogue: Poe, an Information Revolution, and the Real Life American Sensation Tale”

• Christina DeJoseph, a junior Spanish and Exercise Science and Physical Education major from Palmyra, N.J., – Winner of a Prize for Best Abstract
“You Cannot Silence the Beat: The Entenga Royal Drums”

• Aisha Ghodbane, a senior Psychology major from Olivette, Mo.
“Academic Stress and Correlated Factors” (Poster)

• Madelyn Jackstadt, a senior Chemistry major from Barnegat, N.J. - Winner of a Prize for Best Poster
“Ancient and Current Uses of Rutin as an Anti-Inflammatory: Mechanism and Extraction” (Poster)

• Hannah Krauss, a junior English major from Manchester, Md.
“In a Voice Not Like Her Own: Narrator Silence and Absence in ‘The Moonstone’”

• Zoie McNeill, a senior History major from Morgantown, W.Va.
“Neoliberalism’s Effect on Animal Agriculture: What is the Future of the Animal Rights Movement?”

• Samantha Yates, a senior English major from Shepherdstown, W.Va., and Megan Mitchell, a sophomore Accounting major from Berlin, Md.
“The Diary of Blanche: A 21st Century Rewriting of Chaucer’s ‘The Book of the Duchess’”