Presenters

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Paper (in panel 5.a): Teaching Margolin and Sutzkever: A Mix of Real Barriers and Potential Strategies

Samuel Enrique Bello Ulcue's LinkedIn

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Paper (in panel 3.b): "My Heart is Strong": Embracing Liminality in Zitkala-Ša’s "The Soft-Hearted Sioux"

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Paper (in panel 3.a): Digging Deeper: A New Wave of Eco-Horror Novels Takes the Supernatural and Fears of Isolation to Seek "Revenge"

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Paper (in panel 5.a): Illuminated Landscapes in Post-Holocaust Yiddish Poetry: Teaching First Year Composition with Avrom Sutzkever

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Paper (in panel 4.b): Landscapes of Irish Commemoration

Soph Green's LinkedIn

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Paper (in panel 3.a): The Ocean in my Toilet: Subaltern Narratives of Life from the Fish Bowl

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Alex Henry (they/them) is a graduate student in the University of Washington’s English Language & Rhetoric track. They study multilingual exchanges, knowledge production, and linguistic representations in early colonial North America. This year, they are also a Foreign Language & Area Studies fellowship recipient in Canadian Studies studying Inuktitut.

Paper (in panel 4.a): Uncategorized Lands: Lewis & Clark Re-Name the West

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Paper (in panel 2.a): Forest for the Trees

Heather Holland's website

Heather Holland's LinkedIn

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Paper (in panel 4.c): To Love Red Earth

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Paper (in panel 4.c): A Midsummer Night’s Ecological Crisis

Josie Kochendorfer's website

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Josie Kochendorfer is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Criticism. She is working toward her comprehensive exams, where she is exploring narratives of the monstrous and supernatural feminine and female excess. She teaches college writing and literature in Portland, Oregon.

Paper (in panel 4.b): A Wolf in Woman’s Clothing: The Woman-Animal Transformation as Patriarchal Resistance

This presentation looks at Woman's return to her primal nature as a way to both connect to her landscape and to disrupt the power established in a phallocentric structure. By turning to nature, Woman is able to reclaim her body through Cixous’ concept of l'écriture feminine. 

Kristin Kuhns website

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Kristin Kuhns is an Adjunct Professor in the Modern Language Department at Seton Hill University, as well as a PhD Candidate and Graduate Assistant in the Literature and Criticism program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She graduated in 2001 from Smith College with a B.A. in German Language and Cultural Studies and holds a Masters of the Arts in Teaching from the University of Pittsburgh (2007). In May of 2023 she published her book The Origin and Development of Empress Elisabeth’s Legend and her 2001 Bachelor’s Honors Thesis was quoted in the Introduction to Hametz and Schlipphacke’s 2018 book, Sissi’s World. In the fall of 2024 Kuhns won a monetary award through the German Studies Association to present at the international GSA Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. She was also nominated by her local chapter of AATG (American Association of Teachers of German) for the FL-A-CH Award for her scholarship surrounding the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary. In the summer of 2026 her article, “‘The Empress and the Pop Star’: Archetypal Parallels & Patterns between Taylor Swift and Empress Elisabeth” is due to be published as part of an edited book collection, Sis(s)i and Us: New Mythologies, by the University Editions of Dijon (EUD) imprint in France.

Paper 1 (in panel 1.b): Sehnsucht nach dem Mutterland: Maternal Nostalgia and Paranoia, Nature, and Nationalism in Bialik’s 'The Pool'" 

Paper 2 (in panel 4.a): Dene Oxendene: The "Lens" in Tommy Orange’s There There

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Paper (in panel 1.a): Corazón Abandonado or Conflictos del Corazón: A Poetic Autoethnography of the Experience of Learning Argentine Tango

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Paper (in panel 3.a): Hey, That’s Too Far!: Transgressive Fiction and Creative Scholarship

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Rachel Martin is a PhD candidate in Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A Seattle girl to her core, she has lived on three continents and is fascinated by place and belonging. Rachel holds two master’s degrees and is an adjunct instructor in English and Communication Studies. 

Paper (in panel 3.b): When Poetry is the Map: Portability and Place in the Poetry of Esther Belin

Gates MacPherson's LinkedIn

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Paper (in panel 5.b): An Expansion of Criticism in Christian Reading Culture

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Paper (in panel 1.a): Lighting the Way: Finding Self-Worth Beyond Toxic Masculinity

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Aisik Maiti has recently graduated with an MA by Research from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2024). Trained in literary theory,  performance studies, historiography, and political economy, his areas of interest include Victorian Studies, Modernisms, Intellectual History, and Visual Cultures.

Paper (in panel 1.b): "Old chums in a decent edifice": Joseph Conrad and Writing the Seascape at the British Fin de Siècle

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Paper (in panel 4.a): "To the Unconscious!": Landscapes of Inner Space in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World

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Paper (in panel 5.a): Reimagining Writing Pedagogy in Multilingual Classrooms: AI-Assisted Scaffolding and Process-Oriented Learning

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Paper (in panel 1.a): The Power of the Personal: Describing the Experience of Poetic Autoethnography for Teacher-Scholars

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Paper (in panel 5.b): Rewriting Eden: Pastoral Landscapes, Biblical Imagery, and Defying Social Scripts in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Cole Phillip's website

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Paper (in panel 4.c): The American Literary Landscape of the House and Its Quiet

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Paper (in panel 1.b): Writing and Painting Sanctuary: Landscapes of Exile, Belonging, and Place-Making

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Paper (in panel 5.b): Fallen Peoples in Fallen Worlds: The Relationship of Faith and Evil Within Tolkien’s Mythos in Parallel with Paradise Lost

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Paper (in panel 4.b): Breaking the Pomegranate, Writing the Void: The Poetic Page as a Landscape of Absence, Rupture, and Revelation

Blending Jewish mysticism, Spinozist rationality, and Winnicottian play, this paper reconceives poetry as a dynamic landscape of contraction, rupture, and revelation. Through close readings of Avrom Sutzkever’s poetry, it explores how poetic form enacts tzimtzum (divine contraction) and tikkun (repair), treating absence not as loss, but as structured potential. This framework reshapes our understanding of poetry as an interactive process of meaning-making.

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Paper (in panel 3.b): The Space Between: Multi-Ethnic Representation in Literature

Liminal space is a threshold landscape, which disrupts established dichotomies. Scholars like Homi Bhabha highlight the importance of liminal space in negotiating meaning between cultures. The writing of multi-ethnic authors like Tommy Orange and Aria Aber depicts struggles with belonging, displacement, and intersectional cultural identities. Their works challenge the notion of a dominant narrative, emphasizing the importance of teaching multi-ethnic literature as a lens to broaden perspectives and dissolve boundaries.

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Andrea Yingling is PhD Candidate, ABD. She is also an eighth grade English teacher and beekeeper. She lives on a small cherry farm with her husband, two kids, chickens, dog, and cat.

Paper (in panel 2.a): Jane Austen’s Landscapes: Dirt, Power, and the Imagination

Vivienne Tailor's website

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Vivienne Tailor earned her Cultural Studies MA from Claremont Graduate University, Creative Writing MFA from National University, and English BA from the University of Georgia. She researches healing trauma through Art, historical memory, and individual and national identities. Vivienne is editing ReFocus: The Films of Trinh T. Minh-ha and developing two monographs on film and transitional justice.

Paper (in panel 2.a): Belonging to The Blue Sky, The Grey Earth, and The White Mountain: The Shamanic Ecologies of the Mongolian Author Galsan Tschinag