![\"Students](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/41\/2017\/10\/monsterconf300x200-20171020_TCF_IMC_T5D9985-300x200.jpg\")
The conference is a collaboration among three popular classes \u2013 an Honors College course titled \u201cMonsters and the Monstrous\u201d and two Slavic folklore classes \u2013 \u201cVampires: From Slavic Village to Hollywood\u201d and \u201cWerewolves and Shape Shifters in Slavic and East European Folklore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Faculty members Meghan Murphy-Lee, senior lecturer in the Russian Department, and Jacqueline Stuhmiller, visiting assistant professor in the Honors College, came up with the idea of having the seven students who volunteered practice their academic presentation skills with a conference tied to the Halloween season.<\/p>\n
The classes are extremely popular, and this is the second year the Monster Conference has been held, Stuhmiller said. \u201cWe thought that it would be fun to host an undergraduate research conference so that students could share their ideas with each other and with the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou usually don\u2019t get to do papers on those kind of topics \u2013 things you don\u2019t usually find in academia \u2013 so it\u2019s great to do a presentation on something that\u2019s a little bit more fun,\u201d said Alisha Engelberger, a sophomore majoring in history and anthropology. Engelberger, who took two of Murphy-Lee\u2019s classes, originally became interested in wizards, vampires and werewolves through television, and is doing her 15-minute presentation on alpha female werewolves.<\/p>\n
Bailey Flannery, a junior majoring in English literature who took courses from Stuhmiller, said the conference gives her an opportunity to share her research, which examines portrayals of monstrous women and the fear of female sexual power. Those ideas are expressed in literary characters, going all the way back to the tales of Scylla and Charybdis in the Odyssey, she said.<\/p>\n
Krist Schubilske will be talking about how cultural beliefs combined with the physical realities of death and decomposition helped create the concept of the vampire in folklore.<\/p>\n
Schubilske, a linguistics major, has taken Murphy-Lee\u2019s classes on vampires and werewolves, and became interested in the stories and traditions that have turned into the spooky elements celebrated in popular culture, especially at Halloween.<\/p>\n
\u201cI became interested in folklore because folkloric creatures are intrinsically part of the cultures that they are situated in, and can tell us so much about the belief-sets of a given people, how they lived, and what was important to them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vampires, werewolves and monsters of all kinds are starring in academic research presentations at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, just in time for Halloween. Undergraduate students from two programs are sharing their research at a \u201cMonster Conference\u201d on Friday, Oct. 27, from 1 to 3 p.m. in Room 196 of the Honors College, 3363 N. Maryland […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":835,"featured_media":52336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[174,200,175],"tags":[250],"section":[122,124],"display_categories":[],"related-coverage":[],"uwmnews-feed":[167,158],"class_list":["post-52335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-news-in-brief","category-research","tag-student-success","section-campus-community","section-students","uwmnews-feed-alumni-association","uwmnews-feed-letters-science"],"yoast_head":"\n