Winners of the First Year Seminar Research Paper Competition
The Envelope Please…
Christine Woll, Amanda Millis and Kathryn Moore are winners of the
First Year Seminar research paper competition.
First prize of $100 is for Christine Woll's paper, "That
Damned Fence: Relocation Camp Life through the Eyes of Japanese Alien
and Japanese-American Poets," written for Professor Atsuko
Hirai's FYS 234 The U.S. Relocation Camps in World War II. In her balanced
presentation of poets' responses to the conditions and feelings of the
internment camps, Ms. Woll makes clear the power of poetry to deal with
complex human experience. The timeliness of the violation of civil liberties
adds a further dimension. One member of the board commented, "The
poem at the end just wins you over. You can feel it-that damn fence!"
Winner of one of the second prizes of $50, Amanda Millis skillfully
interweaves seminar texts and her own life experience to create a rich
tapestry that instructs even as it dazzles in her paper "Getting
It Right-Side Up," written for Professor Marcia Makris's FYS
261 "Ain't I a Woman?": Reading and Writing a Woman's Life.
In her $50 prizewinning paper "May
the Circle Be Unbroken," written for Professor Elizabeth Eames's
FYS 172 Power and Perception: Cinematic Portraits of Africa, Kathryn
Moore employs a New-critical approach to the 1987 African film Yeleen.
Her evaluation of film technique and of the intentions of the film's
director shows how film is an interdisciplinary medium that can benefit
both the scientific and humanities communities by combining the artist's
eye and the scientist's analysis to teach and enlighten.
Other Papers
The twelve papers submitted to the
competition are published as they were submitted. Only headings were
modified for uniformity.
Three papers, including the top prize winner's, were submitted from
FYS 261. The issues raised by Josepha Gonzalez in her paper "Sexuality.
Orgasm. Lust. Desire" may be eye-opening and helpful for her peers.
Ilham Elhamoumi's "Dare to Be Different" informs, challenges
and invites.
In his scholarly paper "The Mistakes of the Past," FYS 234,
John Klumpp compares the current internment of non-combatants at the
Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba with that of Japanese-American citizens
during World War II. The ideas in this well researched and constructed
paper provide a basis for thinking clearly about one troubling political-military
situation in today's world.
Ava Bessel-"The devil inside made me do it!: Faust's Basis for
Evading Damnation"--and Fabio Periera-"Sand, Through the Hourglass"-submitted
papers with historical, philosophical, literary and ethical dimensions
about Goethe's Faust. Alexandra Hughes, a third student in FYS 278,
invites the reader to share a sympathetic reading of Dante's character
in his Inferno.
Elizabeth Scannell's review of Tough Guise and its effect on
her as a viewer was the focus of her paper "The Influence of Tough
Guise." The film showing was sponsored by the Abused Women's Advocacy
Project. In fulfillment of another option of the same assignment for
FYS 255, Meredith Connor attended the Brooks-Quimby Debate Council's
debate on "Casino Gambling in Maine: The Way Life should Be?"
As a result of their class assignment, both women used their developing
powers of critical analysis to reach their conclusions and then took
responsibility for those conclusions by writing about them.
In her paper "Cooperation in Perspective: Using Globalization
to Achieve Peace," Michelle Stillwell-Parvensky offers the reader
an alternative to the prevailingly negative view that globalization
must be based on exploitative economic competition. She invites the
reader to see economic cooperation and interdependence as the building
blocks for a global society.
All of the research papers submitted to E-clectic's first research
paper competition are a tribute to the intellectual curiosity, industry
and skills of students; to faculty who planned, taught and encouraged;
and they are an indication of the widening scope of expression of humanities
at Bates College.
The editorial board extends congratulations to the winners and thanks
all who submitted their work. Read. Think. Enjoy.
Read First Year Seminar
Research Papers
|