Attached are links to San Diego State University's Student Research Symposium (SRS) programs. Each one includes an abstract of my presentation.
“Plagues, Nazi Germany, and Vampires: An Alternative Insight into the Rat Imagery in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu,”
This was an oral presentation I did back in Spring 2019 when I was a student at SDSU. It was an analysis about the silent horror film Nosferatu and how its rat imagery was used to explore various themes and messages. Looking back now, I think I would had done things differently now that I am aware of sources that would had been nice to know about at the time. If I had to do this presentation again, I would update the information and use more sources. My abstract is on page 93.
Worship of a Decaying Martyr
This was a historical flash fiction story I presented on February 2020. The story is about what happens when Christ does not come back from the dead and his body rots on the cross, which devastates his loved ones and impacts history. When I wrote this story, my intention was to deconstruct the crucifixion of Christ by showing what would had historically happened and to make a point about how religion, no matter how good the founder's intentions were, can be used to contribute to injustice, discrimination, and control. This story was good enough to win me the President's Award For The Arts, but when I submitted it to various magazines for publication, it never got accepted even though it was close a few times. Now that I am able to look at it with more distance, I think the main issue was that the story, while tightly written, had too much exposition and not enough scene (setting or character descriptions, setting details, dialogue, gestures, describing the five senses, etc.). When I get a chance to work on it, I would like to add more scenes and trim down some of the amount of exposition. My abstract is on page 196.