Illinois Philological Association Presenters

Current and former DePaul graduate students and faculty presented papers and read creative work at the 12th annual conference of the Illinois Philological Association (IPA),which took place at Millikin University in Decatur on April 11-12.

Kathleen Mesterharm , a current MAE student, will give “Double, Double, Power in a Bubble: An Examination of the Witches in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”’ in an IPA paper session called “Conflicting Feminism.”

Colby Cuppernull, a 2007 graduate from the MAW, will present “Reading like Writers: A New/Old Approach to Teaching Composition” in a session titled “Literary in the Classroom.”

Roxanne Pilat, a 2006 graduate of the MAW and currently a Ph.D. student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is making two presentations at this year’s IPA conference: at the “20th Century American Voices” session, she will present “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter – Two Artists at Work in the Jazz Age”; at a Fiction Writing session she will read her short story “Iggy and Me.”

John Kwame Tawiah-Boateng, former Visiting Assistant Professor of English at DePaul and currently Assistant Professor of English at Augustana College, will present “Why I Am Not a Feminist: Womanism and African Literature” at the “Conflicting Feminisms” session.

Sara Cordell, former Visiting Assistant Professor of English at DePaul and now Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield, is delivering a paper entitled “What’s the Use of Literature? What Is Literature?” at a session called “In the Mind: Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism.”

Craig Sirles, director of the MAW, will be reading his paper “Writing Life and Death: Style and Structure in Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’” at a session called “Portraits and Self-Portraits.” Professor Sirles is also editor of PIPA, the online journal of the IPA.