At the end of September, Professor Julie Newmark, along with three graduate students attended the 51st annual meeting of the Western Literature Association in Big Sky, Montana. This year, the conference was entitled “The Profane West.”

Julianne Newmark, Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, presented, “Documentation of/and Political Agency: The Texts and Contexts of Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin’s Educational Activism”

Doctoral graduate student, Laurie Lowrance presented, “Resistance to Containment and Conquest in Sarah Winnemucca’s Life among the Piutes and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?”

Julie Williams, a PhD candidate, presented, “‘Radiating Loveliness’: Atomic Tourism, Beauty Queens, and the Cold War West”

Doctoral candidate, Amy Gore presented, “Pretty Shield’s Thumbprint: Body Politics in Paratextual Territory”. For this paper Gore also won the Dorys Grover Award for outstanding papers presented at the conference by graduate students who contribute to critical understandings of region, place, and space in western American literatures.