Symposium offers grad students valuable experience

Symposium offers grad students valuable experience

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Twenty Rice graduate students who have academic interests related to nations and global geopolitics had a chance to practice their paper presentation skills during the Rice Graduate Symposium March 25-26.This year’s symposium focused on the topic “The Post-National Nation: Ideology and Institution in the Global Era.”

“We saw it as a theme that questions the entity of the nation,” said Jeff Jackson, who organized the event with Cory Ledoux. Both are second-year graduate students in the Department of English. “Is the nation becoming outdated and irrelevant, outstripped by globalization?” Jackson asked.

“We liked the way the theme opened itself up to so many disciplinary perspectives,” Ledoux said, noting that presentations ranged from the political and economic ramifications of nationalism to its social and cultural aspects. He and Jackson grouped the presentations into sessions revolving around mini-themes, such as “Border Crossings and the Birth of Global Citizen” and “Religion, Race and Early U.S. (Inter)Nationalisms.”

The organizers did not restrict submissions for the symposium to Rice graduate students because they wanted to increase attendance by students from other universities. “The trend is to get more people from outside Rice to make it a bigger conference that is more akin to a standard professional conference,” Ledoux said. “The symposium enables students to try out material on an audience and get practice fielding questions during Q-and-A but in a more casual atmosphere than at a larger conference.”

Ledoux and Jackson estimated the total conference attendance to be around 100 students and faculty members over the two-day event.

Rice students who presented papers this year were from the English, anthropology and religious studies departments. In addition to Rice, graduate students from University of Minnesota, University of Kansas, University of Colorado, Sam Houston State University, San Francisco State University and City University of New York presented papers.

Sponsored by the departments of English and history, the Center for the Study of Cultures and the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, the symposium included not just presentations by graduate students, but also a roundtable discussion and two guest speakers: Michael Berube, the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University, presented “Cultural Crisis After Sept. 11,” and David Wills, professor of French and English and chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Albany (State University of New York), discussed “No One Home: the Technotropology of Exile.”