Paul Schleifer, SWU Professor

In the Fall of 2017, Sadie Wyant (an early contributor to Freedom’s Hill Primer) finished her project for the Honors Program at Southern Wesleyan University and graduated. Yeah, a December grad.

Funny thing about the way SWU’s Honors Program works: most of our students graduate in May, and during the Spring Semester, the students present the findings of their research at the Research Symposium of the South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities, an organization that helps small, private colleges in the state. This year’s Research Symposium will be held on February 22, 2018. Since part of the requirement for honors students is that they present at a conference (usually the Research Symposium), Sadie needed to find someplace else to present.

She sent a proposal to two different conferences, the Linguistic Conference at the University of Georgia (hosted by the Linguistics Society of UGA), and the annual meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA), a regional branch of the Modern Language Association. Sadie’s presentation was accepted for both conferences.

The two experiences were quite different, almost opposites. The LSUGA is an organization of graduate students studying linguistics at UGA; they have been putting this conference together for the past four years. SAMLA has been around since 1928, and its annual conference sees around 1,200 members.

The linguistics conference was supposed to be held October 6-8, 2017, but there was a big storm coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, and the planners decided to compress the meeting into just two days. I am not sure how many attended, perhaps 50 or so, but despite its small size, the meeting had some relatively big names, most notably Dr. Walt Wolfram, Distinguished University Professor at N.C. State University and producer of the new documentary “Talking Black in America.” Its focus this year was “Crossing Boundaries.” The other presenters were either professors (just a few) or graduate students. Sadie was the only undergraduate who presented.

I know that 50 sounds like a big number, but it is very small for an academic conference, and the feeling was actually quite intimate. Apart from two plenary sessions (where everyone was in the same room), the conference ran two concurrent sessions, held in relatively large lecture halls (they held perhaps 75 people). Each presenter had about 20 minutes along with a few minutes for questions or comments. And most of the presenters worked from PowerPoint, except for Wolfram, who showed his documentary (which was quite interesting and enjoyable). In that sense, Sadie fit right in.

She was a bit nervous before it was her turn, but I think she may have been bolstered a bit by the presenter who went before her, mainly because, even though he is a Ph.D. student at NC State, he was not a very good presenter. And Sadie did a very good job with her presentation which you can find on our website of the Carolina Institute for Faith and Culture.

We received quite a few positive comments from other attendees after Sadie’s presentation. I think the most remarkable comments came from a couple who had come down to Athens from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. They told us how hard it is to get funding for research projects even at the graduate level, and that many of their fellow graduate students are not doing the kind of interesting and innovative research that Sadie was doing as an undergraduate. They said to us several times that they were quite impressed that an undergraduate English major was doing the level of work that Sadie did with her project.

That evening, we attended a reception for the conference and had the opportunity to speak to not only some of the graduate students but also some of the linguistic faculty who attended. The most notable of the latter was Dr. William Kretzschmar, the Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia. Dr. Kretzschmar hosts the Linguistic Atlas Project, a resource which Sadie was able to access for her research project. We thanked Dr. Kretzschmar, and he responded by saying that part of the purpose of having such a resource is to make it available to people who want or need it. That is truly the way academic research should be—a resource that is freely available to anyone who wants or needs it. Of course, Sadie cited the contribution of the Linguistic Atlas Project in her paper, as any good research will do.

Four weeks later, Sadie and I attended, very briefly, SAMLA in Atlanta, GA. I say very briefly because, while SAMLA covers three days, we decided to drive down to Atlanta on Saturday morning, very early, just in time for her presentation, and then we left after attending only one other concurrent session. The SAMLA conference probably had over 1,000 attendees, and it had multiple, maybe a dozen or more, concurrent sessions at each session time.

Sadly, the concurrent session in which Sadie presented the findings of her research had only seven or eight people, three of whom were presenters. Perhaps it was sparsely attended because it was listed as an undergraduate research session, so all three presenters were undergraduates (there were supposed to be four presenters but one did not show). So despite the massive size of the conference, the experience of presenting was a lot more intimate than the linguistics conference had been.

It is traditional in the MLA that presenters simply read the paper they have written out loud. In fact, when we talk about presenting at a conference, we generally say something like, “I’m reading a paper at the Southeast Conference on Christianity and Literature next month.” In my upper division classes at SWU, I sometimes have my students read papers they have written out loud just to have the experience. And the other two presenters in Sadie’s session read their papers. Honestly, it is a bit harder to follow a paper that is just read, but both papers were on literary topics rather than on a linguistics topic, so it was not that difficult to keep up.

There was more time for comments and questions at the SAMLA session than there had been at LCUGA, probably because one of the presenters failed to show. And Sadie got a few good questions and a few good comments, but not with the depth that she experience at LCUGA. Still, it was a good experience.

To be honest, I sometimes question the value of conference presentations and journal articles, especially when those papers focus on obscure writers whom few people have heard of. And another psychoanalytic study of Hamlet’s hesitating or another Marxist analysis of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie really does not contribute to the world at large. But Sadie Wyant’s research project, though underfunded and limited, is the kind of research that could make a real contribution. I really enjoyed attending LCUGA and SAMLA, but more importantly I’m proud to have been connected to her work.

Send a congratulatory note to Sadie, if you get a chance.