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Five Bryn Mawr Students Present Papers at Undergraduate Humanities Conference

April 27, 2026
a group of students seated together
(From left) Claire Melican, Charlee Thacker, Alejandre Lamas-Nemec, Haven Beckman, and Elliott London.
Earlier this month, five Bryn Mawr students presented their research at the Lycoming Undergraduate Humanities Research Conference. 
 
Claire Melican '29 won the award for best literature paper for How to Make Pear Tree Sex PG: Rewriting Chaucer's ' The Merchant's Tale' for Children," a paper that was adapted from her final paper from a course on the Canterbury Tales taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Mary M. Alcaro in the Department of Literatures in English last semester. 
 
Also presenting at the conference were:
Charlee Thacker '26, Songs of the Sea: Afrodiasporic Embodiments of Water, in a session titled Racialized Bodies & Trauma in Afrodiasporic Literature.
 
Haven Beckman '29, Industrial Witchcraft, Green Cthulhus: Reconciling with Planetary Strangeness through Speculative Fiction, in the session Resistance in Art & Literature
 
Elliot London '26, presented Anti-Blackness and American Humor: How the Canonization of Sambo and the Savage Materializes Harm against Black Men, in the session Power & Evolution of Language
 
Alejandre Lamas-Nemec '29 presented Beyond the Romance of Saints: A Comparative Analysis of Chaucer's 'Tale of Sir Thopas,' Beneit of St. Alban's La Vie de Saint Thomas Becket en Verse, and Tail-Rhyme Schemes for a panel called Live, Laf(ayette), Love.
 
Alcaro accompanied the students at the conference, and all three first-year students were enrolled in Alcaro's Chaucer seminar last semester.