Department of English
UCMLA Conference
Undergraduate Conference on Multiethnic Literatures of the Americas
California State University, Fresno
13th annual conference: Friday, March 11 and Saturday, March 12, 2022
Location: Online, via Zoom
Download the full conference program
Featured Speakers
Evening Keynote: Amparo Ortiz
Amparo Ortiz is the author of Blazewrath Games and Dragonblood Ring (Page Street Kids). She was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and currently lives on the island’s northeastern coast. She’s published short story comics in Marvel's Voices: Comunidades #1 and in the Eisner-award winning Puerto Rico Strong (Lion Forge).
When she’s not teaching ESL, she’s streaming K-pop videos, vlogging for her eponymous YouTube channel, and writing about worlds both contemporary and fantastical.
Afternoon Keynote: Dr. Rajini Srikanth
Dr. Rajini Srikanth is Dean of Faculty and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In addition to the English department, she is affiliated with three other academic “homes” at UMass Boston: the Human Rights minor, the Asian American Studies program, and the graduate program in Critical Ethnic and Community Studies. Her research interests span literature and human rights, comparative race and ethnic studies, Asian American Studies, global Anglophone literature, South Africa, and literature and the political imagination.
Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice (2018) and The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (2016). She is the author of two monographs: Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in US Literature and Law (2012) and The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (2004), as well as numerous other journal articles and book chapters that engage such issues as academic freedom, literary responses to the “global war on terror,” community activism, global public health, and critical multiethnic literary studies.
About the Conference
Founded in 2010, UCMLA has featured more than 100 undergraduate student presenters.
The Undergraduate Conference on Multiethnic Literatures of the Americas was founded in 2010 to provide undergraduate students with a professional venue in which to present their research and to foreground the increasingly significant study of multiethnic literatures, particularly the interconnectedness of those literatures across cultures, nations, and languages.
Undergraduate students gain experience in writing abstracts, presenting papers, and engaging in scholarly debate and discussion. The presentation of their research also serves to enhance the curriculum of Fresno State’s English Department.
The conference is organized by the department’s graduate students and faculty advisers.
In 2017, the 8th annual UCMLA conference was dedicated to the memory of Mireyda "Mia" Barraza Martinez and opened with a tribute to her.
Mia was a beloved student, scholar, poet, and activist who believed deeply in the UCMLA mission. As an undergraduate, she presented papers on Wendy Rose (2013) and Andrés Montoya (2014). As a graduate student, she volunteered her time and talent to design the conference programs, and she served on the conference organizing committee in 2015 and 2016.
Mia died in a car accident in November 2016, one semester away from graduating with her MFA in creative writing. She was 29. Her MFA was awarded posthumously.
2022 — Amparo Ortiz and Rajini Srikanth
2021 — Gerald Vizenor and Monica De La Torre
2020 — Erika L. Sánchez and Ishmael Reed
2019 — Maxine Hong Kingston and Elda María Román
2018 — Reyna Grande and Gary Y. Okihiro
2017 — Wendy Rose and Arturo Arias
2016 — Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Michele Elam
2015 — Manuel Muñoz and Marilyn Chin
2014 — Roxane Gay
2013 — Samiya Bashir
2012 — Hayan Charara and Jorge Huerta
2011 — Cherrie Moraga
Call for Papers
Deadline to submit: Jan. 24, 2022. Download the 2022 Call for Papers.
This conference focuses on the multiethnic literatures of North America, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Students from any major may submit abstracts. We encourage analytical papers on any thematic or formal aspect of a text or group of texts, including film and other cultural productions. The argument should illuminate the work(s) in original ways while drawing on available scholarship to make its case.
We invite current undergraduate students and those who have graduated within the past year, as well as first-year graduate students, to submit a 250-word abstract (summary) of their papers. Students whose abstracts are accepted will present their papers at the conference.
We hope that by presenting at the conference or attending some of the panel discussions, many undergraduates will find themselves interested in the possibility of graduate school and that many others will discover the rewards of being part of a community of scholars.
Deadline for submission of your 250-word abstract is Monday, Jan. 24, 2022.
Submit your abstract to the UCMLA committee by email either uploaded as a Word document or copied and pasted in the body of the email.
For further details, please see the FAQs tab.
Need help with your abstract? The UCMLA committee offers the following opportunities.
Workshop on writing abstracts:
Friday, Dec. 3, 2021 from 3 to 4 p.m. Online. Email Dr. Melanie Hernandez for the Zoom link.
Graduate students will be available to provide advice and guidelines for writing abstracts, to answer questions, and to provide examples.
Early submission of drafts of abstracts:
If you submit a draft of your abstract by email by Monday, Jan. 3, 2022, you will receive feedback by email and will have time to revise and polish your abstract by the Jan. 24, 2022 deadline.
How to Present / What to Expect workshop:
Friday, March 4, 2022 from 3 to 4 p.m. Online. Email Dr. Melanie Hernandez for the Zoom link.
Previous UCMLA presenters will hold an informal chat to answer any of your last-minute questions about what to expect the day of the conference: how to deliver your paper, materials to prepare, what to wear, how to field questions, what their experience was like, helpful tips, how to deal with nerves, etc. It’s an open forum! Bring your questions.
13th Annual Conference Schedule
All online conference sessions are free and open to the public via Zoom. Pre-registration is required for each session.
Download the full conference program.
Speaker: Dr. Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval, President, Fresno State
Moderator: Dr. Melanie Hernandez
Presenters:
- Andrea Perez-Basurto, “Alienation and Identity Problems in Tommy Orange's There There”
- Mallory Crow, “Crucified by Paternalism: Acevedo's Feminist Challenging of Catholicism in The Poet X”
- Desiree Gonzalez, “Anzaldúan Queer Consciousness in Lori Saffin's Captive Genders: Transembodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex”
- Hannah Leece, “Put Down Your Pencils: Finding Alternatives to Standardized Testing”
Moderator: Mia De La Cerda, M.A. English (Literature)
Presenters:
- Lindsay Norton, “Identities of Resistance: The Formation of the Urban Indian in Physical Places and Digital Spaces in Tommy Orange’s There There”
- Laura Thor, “Giving Voice to Black Men in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose”
- Griffin Sharp, “The Social Mask of Race in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”
- Gloria Luna, “Chola Fashion: A Symbol of Resistance”
Moderator: Julieta Ortiz, M.A. English (Literature)
Lunch on your own
Speaker: Dr. Rajini Srikanth, Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College, University of Massachusetts Boston
Moderator: Graciela Sierra-Moreno, M.A. English (Literature)
Presenters:
- Alea Droker, “Voicing the Silenced Record: Amanda Kemp’s Show Me the Franklins”
- Scarleth Cortes, “The Craft of Tequila Making: A Chicanx Cultural Studies Analysis”
- Rebecca Colbert, “Ride or Die: An Analysis of Low Riders through Bourdieusian and Marxist Theories”
- Armando Aranda, “Harlem Heroes: A Digital Tour of Harlem Renaissance Cartoonists”
Moderator: Alexander Flores, M.A. English (Literature)
Dinner on your own
Meet the Organizers
The conference is organized by the English Department's graduate students and faculty advisers.
Mia De La Cerda
M.A. English
Alvaro Lozano
M.A. English
Graciela Sierra-Moreno
M.A. English
Faculty Advisers
Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian, Dr. Samina Najmi, Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio
Frequently Asked Questions
You can email the organizing committee if you have further questions.
Conferences such as this provide a way for scholars to exchange ideas and present their research. The conference offers you an opportunity to participate in scholarly conversation.
You will have the experience of writing an abstract, writing or revising a paper, reading or presenting your work in a panel with other scholars, and answering and posing questions. This is very valuable experience for anyone who plans to teach, engage in literary research, or go to graduate school. It is also good general experience in presenting information in a public forum.
The presence of many diverse voices also strengthens the conference.
This year's virtual conference will be held on Friday, March 11, and Saturday, March 12, 2022. The sessions will be 100% online, due to Covid-19 safety precautions.
Academic conferences serve multiple purposes.
You share your ideas with a scholarly community and benefit from their feedback. You attend panels on authors or themes that interest you and learn from the perspectives of the panelists. Professional conference papers often lead to full-length articles appropriate for publication.
This conference aims to mentor undergraduates in the process of presenting their research, to involve graduate students as event organizers, and to foreground the field of multiethnic literatures of the Americas.
This conference welcomes presentations that critically engage “texts” in a variety of formats.
While literature certainly includes traditional forms (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama), cultural studies expands this definition to include other artifacts that prompt related critical reflections. Presentations on film, television, art, music, and other popular forms are welcome.
The term includes North, South, and Central America, as well as the Caribbean.
Yes. However, we ask that you present your paper in English.
Yes, if the writer’s whiteness is relevant to your analysis of the text, or if the work demonstrates a significant engagement with race or ethnicity.
An abstract is a summary of your complete argument. We ask that you keep your abstract limited to 250 words.
The conference is intended for current undergraduates (from any department) and students who graduated within the past year. Students enrolled in Open University courses may submit abstracts as well.
Yes. The UCMLA committee offers the following opportunities.
Workshop on writing abstracts:
Friday, Dec. 3, 2021 from 3 to 4 p.m. Online. Email Dr. Melanie Hernandez for the Zoom link.
Graduate students will be available to provide advice and guidelines for writing abstracts, to answer questions, and to provide examples.
Early submission of drafts of abstracts:
If you submit a draft of your abstract by email by Monday, Jan. 3, 2022, you will receive feedback by email and will have time to revise and polish your abstract by the Jan. 24, 2022 deadline.
How to Present / What to Expect workshop:
Friday, March 4, 2022 from 3 to 4 p.m. Online. Email Dr. Melanie Hernandez for the Zoom link.
Previous UCMLA presenters will hold an informal chat to answer any of your last-minute questions about what to expect the day of the conference: how to deliver your paper, materials to prepare, what to wear, how to field questions, what their experience was like, helpful tips, how to deal with nerves, etc. It’s an open forum! Bring your questions.
The abstract is due Jan. 24, 2022. Please email it to us as a Word document or PDF file and paste it in the body of an email. If you have already submitted an abstract for feedback, please resubmit your revised version or a new abstract by this deadline.
The conference organizing committee will select from among the submissions and group the chosen abstracts into appropriate panels.
Absolutely. If the abstract is accepted, be sure to revise your paper to meet the criteria of the conference.
If your abstract is accepted, you will receive an email from the conference organizers by mid-February.
You will probably have until the day of the conference to prepare your paper. However, panel chairs sometimes ask panelists to submit their papers a few days earlier so that they can formulate their own remarks about the panel as a whole. Be prepared.
Your paper should be 6-7 pages long, or whatever you can read coherently in 12-14 minutes. It is vital that you rehearse your reading ahead of time and respect the time limit because otherwise the chair or moderator of your panel will have to cut you off abruptly.
Yes. What matters is not the number of sources consulted but how meaningfully your paper engages with them.
The conference program committee groups individual papers into panels based on general thematic connections. There are usually three or four presenters per panel.
Each panel has a moderator who introduces the panelists and invites them to come up, one by one, to present their papers. A Q&A follows, in which the moderator facilitates questions from the audience and the panelists respond.
There is usually a short break between panels.
Yes, most presenters at English conferences just read their papers. Occasionally, a presenter will speak to the audience or combine speaking with reading
You may also incorporate audio-visual material if you wish. In that case, let the organizers know of your technological needs in advance.
- Rehearse your paper in advance and be sure to time yourself.
- Stand up when you present. Your voice will project better and you will have more presence.
- Use the microphone if available.
- Project your voice and enunciate every word.
- Read slowly and clearly. Don't speed through your paper breathlessly.
- Look up from time to time and make eye contact with the audience.
- When you make eye contact, keep your finger on the page so as not to lose your place.
- Introduce quotations with the word "quote," and signal the end of the quotation with "unquote" or "end quote."
- End your presentation by looking up and saying "thank you."
Please do! We encourage everyone, including the community, to attend. The audience is also welcome to ask questions about the papers during each panel’s Q&A.
No. Your conference program will give you the panel titles and names of panelists, and you may choose which ones to attend. It is courteous to sit through a complete panel (usually 3 or 4 papers) and make your exit during the break between panels.
Feel free to bring a snack with you and eat it at any time while you are in the audience. Depending upon funds, we hope to be able to provide some refreshments. The idea is that you get a chance to mingle with presenters and attendees in a relaxed setting.
Yes! This conference is enriched by the presence and support of the English Department’s graduate students.
Once we have selected abstracts and placed them in appropriate panels, we will invite graduate students to serve as moderators. So let us know if you are interested. But just to have our graduate students in the audience, engaged with the presentations, makes the conference a more stimulating experience for all.
A moderator’s basic responsibility is to introduce the panel at the beginning and facilitate questions from the audience after all panelists have presented.
Most moderators ask for brief bios of their panelists ahead of time. Some also ask their panelists for their papers in advance so that they can read them, draw connections among them, and ask questions of the panelists to spark discussion.
Previous UCMLA conferences
The Undergraduate Conference on Multiethnic Literatures of the Americas is now in its second decade, after celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2019.
Dozens of graduate students have joined English Department faculty to successfully organize the conference, which has featured the scholarly work of 100+ undergraduate students.
Organizing committee: Dr. William Arcé, Elizabeth Bolaños, Prof. Joseph Cassara, Esmeralda Gamez, Nou Her, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Dr. Samina Najmi, Delaney R. Whitebird Olmo, Michael Ramirez, Ernesto Reyes, Hector Tapía III
Keynote speakers: Erika L. Sánchez and Ishmael Reed
10th anniversary alumni panel: Neama Alamri, Leila Alamri-Kassim, Erin L. Álvarez, Carrie Ayala, Jeremiah Henry, Cody Hoover, Lena Mahmoud, Zoyer Zyndel
Organizing committee: Dr. William Arcé, Shanell Contreras, Bryce Downing, Esmeralda Gamez, Angel Garduno, Michaella Gonzalez, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Dr. Samina Najmi, Tara Williams
Keynote spakers: Maxine Hong Kingston and Elda María Román
Organizing committee: Dr. William Arcé, Shanell Contreras, Bryce Downing, Esmeralda Gamez, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Christina Legler, Dr. Samina Najmi, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega, Tara Williams
Keynote speakers: Reyna Grande and Gary Y. Okihiro
Organizing committee: Dr. William Arcé, Mireyda Barraza Martinez, Jazmin Flores, Dr. Chris Henson, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Dr. Samina Najmi, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega, Tara Williams
Keynote speakers: Wendy Rose and Arturo Arias
Organizing committee: Dr. William Arcé, Mireyda Barraza Martinez, Emily Beals, Jazmin Flores, Dr. Chris Henson, Gloria Hernandez, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, Kyle Hoover, Dr. Samina Najmi, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega, Tara Williams
Keynote speakers: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Michele Elam
Organizing committee: Eryn Baldrica-Guy, Emily Beals, Jeremiah Henry, Dr. Chris Henson, Gloria Hernandez, Kyle Hoover, Prof. Randa Jarrar, Prof. Samina Najmi
Keynote speakers: Manuel Muñoz and Marilyn Chin
Organizing committee: Dr. Chris Henson, Cody Hoover, Dr. Samina Najmi, Shane Wood, Lena Zaghmouri
Keynote speaker: Roxane Gay
Organizing committee: Prof. Randa Jarrar, Dr. Samina Najmi, Lena Zaghmouri
Keynote speakers: Samiya Bashir and Patricia Engel
Organizing committee: Prof. Alex Espinoza, Gilliann Hensley, Dr. Analola Santana, Lena Zaghmouri
Keynote speakers: Hayan Charara and Jorge Huerta
Organizing committee: Erin L. Álvarez, Prof. Alex Espinoza, Miriam Fernandez, Dr. Kathleen Godfrey, Cynthia Guardado, Maryam Jamali Ashtiani, Dr. Samina Najmi, Mario Rosado, Dr. Analola Santana, Dr. Bo Wang
Keynote speaker: Cherríe Moraga
Organizing committee: Prof. Alex Espinoza, Maryam Jamali Ashtiani, Dr. Samina Najmi, Mario Rosado, Dr. Analola Santana
Faculty Advisers
Dr. Melanie Hernandez
Prof. Melanie Kachadoorian
Dr. Samina Najmi
Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio
Contact
UCMLA
Fresno State, Dept of English
5245 N. Backer Ave., PB98
Fresno, CA 93740-8001
559.278.2553
Peters Business Building
Room 382