Titusville Students Present at National Pop Culture Meeting

Five students from Brevard Community College’s Titusville Campus presented academic papers at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference (PCA/ACA) in Washington, D.C.

PCA/ACA brings together more than 3,000 academics and students to present academically rigorous research from a variety of disciplines.

"This is important recognition for our students' academic excellence because their abstracts were good enough to be accepted and presented side-by-side with college professors from across the nation," said Dr. Phil Simpson, the Titusville Campus Provost, and himself a popular culture expert who attended the conference as the national organization's chair for two areas of scholarly research: "Vampires in Literature, Culture and Film" and also the pop culture impact of well-known horror and science fiction author Stephen King.

The five students selected to present at the conference were from the Fall 2012 session of Titusville communication and humanities professor Warren Jones Humanities Special Topics Course: “Science Fiction and Humor.” They had spent four months researching, writing and then submitting the papers to the national conference.

The students and their topics are:

• Ashley White (“Mentor Who?: Understanding the role of modern mentors through Doctor Who”)
• Justin Hadwin (“Garbage in, Gospel out: Applications of ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’ in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its Relation to the Future of Human-Machine Interface”)
• Thomas Chiodini (“Concerns Across Time: A look at how The Time Machine by H.G Wells and Doctor Who portray similar issues and concerns”)
• Alyssa Hedricks (“42: Understanding Surrealism through Logic”)
• Katie Dimaria (“Doctor Who, MD: The Doctor of All Things Cosmic?”)

"It's a real testament to the excellence of our students and the preparation that Professor Jones put them through to be ready to present at the conference," said Dr. Simpson, who sat in on several of the panel presentations. "This is an international organization of scholars who are applying their analytical tools to the pop culture impact of everything from fashion to vampires. To see our undergraduate students being so professional in the sessions and the question and answer periods afterward was so impressive."

In the Fall of 2013, the process will begin again for other Titusville students with the offering of a Special Topics in Humanities course called “Dystopia," which relates to the study of often fictional societies that are the opposite of desirable utopias, such as the dystopian society in author George Orwell's "1984."