Dr. Bethany Hicok, Westminster College associate professor of English, presented a paper and chaired a panel at the Modernist Studies Association conference Nov. 5-8 in Montreal, Quebec.

Hicok's paper, "Surviving the Blast: the Nuclear Poetics of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath," was part of the Cold War Poetics panel.

"In this paper I argued that what I called the 'nuclear poetics' of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell has much in common with Alain Resnais' 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, especially how the two poets create an intersection between personal trauma and historical trauma in their work that then becomes an important act of remembering," Hicok said. "My point was to show how this filmic text and the poetic texts that borrow the imagery of nuclear annihilation share a discourse about memory, desire, and trauma that creates a performative space that allows the reader to identify with the speaker of the poems and subsequently with the catastrophic event of possible nuclear holocaust."

Hicok also chaired the panel Between Modernism and the Lyric.

Hicok, who has been with Westminster since 2001, earned an undergraduate degree from Russell Sage College and two masters and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

Contact Hicok at (724) 946-6349 or e-mail hicokbf@westminster.edu for more information.

Dr. Bethany Hicok