During a virtual ceremony on May 19, the Department of English celebrated the accomplishments of English majors in the Class of 2020.
The English Department’s traditional end-of-year party and awards ceremony went virtual this year as photographs of graduating seniors screened one-by-one and Miles Davis’s “All Blues” played in the background.
On the last day of finals on May 19, three screens of English majors, minors and faculty members Zoomed at 5 p.m. to celebrate the achievements of all 28 graduates and to honor three in particular.
Laura Braley ’20 received the English Scholar Award which recognizes superior academic achievement by a graduating senior. Maeve Riley ’20 won both the English Leadership Award for her outstanding contributions to the life of the department as well as the English Department’s student-worker-of-the-year award. Anne-Tillery Melson ’21 received the Betty Gerow Scholarship for the 2020-21 academic year.
Besides these departmental awards, students in senior seminar courses were awarded for their semester projects.
- Valerie Medlin’s paper, “‘Even in Death’: Exposing Institutional Oppression through Grave Robbing in Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad,’” won the Outstanding Literature Senior Seminar Research Award.
- Hayden McConnell received the Outstanding Professional Writing and Rhetoric Senior Seminar Project for “Making the Topic of Rhetoric More Accessible to New and Current Members of the Field of Rhetoric.”
- Angela Myers received the PWR junior ePortfolio Award for PWR and ENG Majors and PWS Minors.
Post-award entertainment was interactive: one Kahoot! (involving baby pictures of faculty members) and one old-fashioned, hand-raising vote for the summer’s shelter-in-place Book Club. After the awards ceremony, guests stayed around chatting, not wanting the party to end.