Sophomores present papers at humanities conference

Brooklyn Landgraf ’21 of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Dakota Marlega ’21 of Waupaca, Wisconsin, presented papers at the Streamlines undergraduate humanities conference Nov. 10. The conference was held at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.
The papers both related to Don Quixote. The English translation of Landgraf’s paper is “Skepticism: The search for the truth in Don Quixote.” The English translation of Marlega’s paper is “Step to the side, quixotic men! The women have arrived.”
Both students are studying Spanish and took the Don Quijote senior seminar last year as first-years. At the end of the semester, each student presented a 10-page research paper on an aspect of Don Quijote in a mock conference setting created in the classroom.
Their papers were submitted to the conference and were accepted.
“We loved having the opportunity to present as sophomores at an undergraduate humanities conference,” Marlega says. “This was the first time presenting research at an undergraduate conference for both of us, and we presented entirely in Spanish — which is not our native language. We had the opportunity to watch others present, listening to poems, film studies analyses, and short works of fiction.
“It was exciting to gain experience in the real world and great to use the practice we had gotten from our mock conference in our Don Quijote seminar last spring semester.”
(Photo: Dakota Marlega, left, and Brooklyn Landgraf)