The 2022 Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature was held March 19 at the University of Portland. Three Seattle University English majors participated this year.

McCalee Cain, senior, delivered two papers and won the Brass NUCL Award for Hardest Hitting Paper 2022 for her essay written for the SU class, “Art and Violence in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced: Reading Western Domination over Muslim Representation in Amir’s and Emily’s Relationship.” She presented a second paper the class, “Re-Beginning in the East: Examining Intersecting Discourses of Gender and Orientalism in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.”

Stephen Leach, senior, received the number two spot for the Brass NUCL, the Honorable Mention, for his essay written for the class: “What Do We Say to the God of Death? Examining the Modern Relevance of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.”

Edward Voloshin, a junior English major and University Honors IT student, presented a paper written for the seminar in C20-21 Literature, “Postmodernism into Post-Meaning: the Abdication of Meaning in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.”

The Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature invites students to share their literary research and creative writing with a community of their peers. University of Portland Professor emeritus Herman Asarnow founded the conference in 2004 in response to a question from his daughter—"why are there so many science fairs but no literature fairs?"

 Photo, left to right, McCallee Cain, Stephen Leach, Edward Volsohin