“Compadres de los Suburbios”: Hip-hop Counterculture in the Andean Sprawl of El Alto

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Matthew Harrison and Faculty Mentor: Brian Pierce, Spanish and Portuguese For as long as we have recognized the existence of music, it has been inevitably and profoundly representative of our world’s many diverse cultures. By chance, just the other week I had the opportunity to chat with some family members about the origins of modern […]

Antiochus IV and the Origin of Jewish Martyrdom Literature

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Allen Kendall and Faculty Mentor: Stephen Bay, Comparative Arts and Letters The study of ancient martyrdom literature has typically revolved around early Christian literature. Many scholars view the concept of martyrdom as a Christian construct, which borrowed only minimally from earlier literary traditions.1This assumption exists largely because Christian writers first used the term “martyr”—originally a […]

Exploration of Creative Nonfiction Writing in Reykjavik

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Rachel Dalrymple and Faculty Mentor: Joohn Bennion, English Department The purpose of this project was to increase my understanding of nonfiction writing by collaborating with prominent nonfiction writers at the NonfictioNow conference in Reykjavik in June 2017. Following the conference, I created a portfolio of nonfiction essays. Selections of these essays were submitted to BYU’s […]

How Teachers Grade Native and Non-Native Writing: Exposing Biases and Grading Discrepancies

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Jenna Snyder and Faculty Mentor: Dr. Grant Eckstein, Linguistics and English Language With Dr. Grant Eckstein leading our research team, we gathered TESOL writing teachers together to start our data collection. Using an eye-tracker, we monitored the different grading tendencies of 10 different writing teachers. Using this data, we made important observations and applications to […]

A Look at Peruvian Theater: A Translation of and Reflection on No hay isla feliz

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Rachel Draut and Faculty Mentor: Marlene Esplin, Comparative Arts and Letters No hay isla feliz (1954) is a significant part of Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s repertoire and a valuable work of Latin American literature that deserves to be known to the English-speaking world. The play’s author was one of most influential Peruvian authors of his time […]

Poets of Resistance: Restoring Life to the Student Writings of the Intermountain Indian School

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Terence Wride and Faculty Mentor: Michael Taylor, English Department In hopes of permanently removing them from their Indigenous cultures and communities, from 1950 to 1984, thousands of Navajo and other American Indian children were sent to Brigham City, Utah to attend the Intermountain Indian School, the largest of nineteen postwar federal Indian boarding schools that […]