Researched Project Assignment

The major project will be a 12-15 page critical paper on a topic of your choice; there are only a few restrictions on it.

To complete a project of this size, you will need to pose a fairly significant question: not just "How does Marie de France use animal imagery to make gender commentary in Bisclavret?" (which would give you maybe 3 pages) but "How does Marie de France use animal imagery throughout her Lais" or "What attitudes towards fin amor are revealed in Marie’s Lais and what do they tell us about her stance(s) towards women and men?"

Since we are defining "literature" in this class as meaning "texts written for, by, or about" women, you can feel free to work with categories like medical texts, or courtesy books, or letter collections, or sermons, as well as the traditional poetry, essays, tales, drama, etc.

If you want to broaden the definition of "texts" to include images and/or music, please talk to me; I think that will work, but you can’t just say "Here are a lot of pictures of women in the middle ages" and then cut and paste twelve pages of .jpgs from Google and call it a paper. The pictures and music can support your argument but they cannot replace it. Sorry.

I will be happy to brainstorm topics with you and to help you start finding resources you can use to track down information. Come by during office hours or set up an appointment with me. (This is best done face-to-face rather than by e-mail so that I can start pulling books off the shelves for you.)

1. National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), April 21-23, 2004 will be held at the Virginia Military Institute.  NCUR® 2005 will bring together undergraduates involved in scholarly and artistic activities representing a range of disciplines including creative arts, mathematics, business, social science, humanities, physical and life sciences, natural resources, and engineering, among others. Participants are expected to come from more than 300 colleges and universities representing almost every state in the nation. Deadline for abstracts and student presenters and student presenters and faculty/administrator presenters is November 15, 2004. (for more information go to http://www.ncur.org) or talk to Dr. Dwight Dimaculangan in Biology. Some funding for student travel for this conference will be available from the Office of Sponsored Programs in McLaurin on a competitive basis. Dr. Dimaculangan has the information on this.

2. The College of Arts and Sciences is providing some additional travel support (see attached guidelines) if you are going to a conference like NCUR.

3. Summer Support. If you get into your research and want to follow it up next summer, this program is available:
CUR: 2005 Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowships
The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) awards summer fellowships to the students of faculty members interested in mentoring an undergraduate student at primarily undergraduate institutions. CUR fellowships provide a unique opportunity for undergraduate students and their faculty mentors to engage in approximately ten weeks of full-time research at their home institution. The online application for the 2005 Summer Fellowship will be open on September 1, 2004. The submission deadline is November 26, 2004. The grant application must be submitted by a faculty mentor. For more information go to http://www.cur.org/fellowships.html . I will be happy to work with you on this if you are interested!

4. The Southern Regional Honors Council meeting is in April in Louisiana; I don’t have information on paper submission yet but that’s another possible venue for presenting. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear about this. South Carolina is very underrepresented at this conference so it might mean you have a good chance of being accepted.