With great pleasure, the Virginia Humanities Conference announces our first awards for Outstanding Graduate and Undergraduate Presentations. These presentations were given during the 2017 VHC meeting hosted by Shenandoah University.
The winner of the Outstanding Undergraduate Presentation is Zachary Stephens, for his presentation “Machines as Equal Automata.” Zachary Stephens is a rising Sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University who is pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. His interest in Computer Science, which led him to this work, stems from involvement with the Atlee High School robotics team, where I served as Head of Programming for four years.
The winner of the Outstanding Graduate Presentation is Emily Watlington, for her presentation “Fear and Boredom on a Feedback Loop: Brazen Apathy in Ryan Trecartin’s Junior War.” Emily Watlington is a graduate student in MIT’s program in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture. She is also the Curatorial Research Assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her research focuses on contemporary art, particularly video, through the lenses of affect theory and feminist theory. Her art criticism has appeared in numerous periodicals and exhibition catalogs, and she is a regular contributor to Mousse. In 2017, she received the Vera List Writing Prize for Visual Arts.
Congratulations!
