Students of all Disciplines Gather to Present at John Wesley Powell Research Conference

April 10, 2023

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. ⁠— Illinois Wesleyan University students from varied majors and interests will gather to present research at the John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference on Saturday, April 15. 

Presentations will take place from 9 to 11:45 a.m. in the Center for Natural Sciences (CNS) and from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. on the first floor of State Farm Hall. A reception and awards ceremony for the 36th Annual Student Art Exhibition will also take place from 1-3 p.m. in the Merwin and Wakeley Galleries in the Joyce Eichhorn Ames School of Art and Design Building.. 

Held in April each year, the conference provides an opportunity for students who are pursuing individual projects to present those projects in a public forum.

“ What makes the JWP conference so wonderful is that any student in any discipline can present their research. Having a space where students and faculty are given the opportunity to peruse all of the various projects that are happening on campus will surely stimulate future collaborations between disciplines. It’s what the liberal arts are all about,” said Associate Professor and Associate Director of the School of Music Bill Hudson, who helped organize the event.

The keynote speaker for this year’s conference is poet and essayist Molly McCully Brown . Her address, “Building a Place for Our Bodies: A Reading + Talk” will take place in CNS 101 from 12-12:30 p.m.

Brown’s publications include Places I’ve Taken My Body, a collection of essays which explores the limits of a body diagnosed with cerebral palsy; and The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded , a poetry collection which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017.

Brown attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Stanford University and the University of Mississippi where she received a master's in fine arts. She teaches English at Old Dominion University. Brown has also received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. 

Established in 1990, the annual student research conference is named for explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran and a founder of the National Geographic Society, who joined Illinois Wesleyan University’s faculty in 1865.

More information on the conference is available here .

By Maria Harmon '23