October 9, 2009
Stephanie Harper, a senior English Literature major, presented her essay titled "A New Life for Helga Crane: Affirming the Maternal in Nella Larsen's Quicksand" at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association meeting in Snowbird, Utah, Oct. 8-10. The paper was part of a panel on "Mothers in Literature of Color in the Twentieth Century." Her thesis challenges the scholarship that interprets maternity in Larsen's novel negatively, as a trap that limits the protagonist's freedom at the end of the book.