On April 6 2025, Hunter Daum presented a paper at Lycoming College’s second annual Undergraduate Humanities Research Conference. Hunter’s paper is titled, “Queer, Religious, and Victorian Women Explored through the Works of Christina Rossetti and Zadie Smith’s The Fraud” and they presented on the “Intersecting Femininity” panel. Hunter is a human society major minoring in communications, on track to graduate in 2025.
Students came from all over the region to present papers at this humanities conference. “Anyone who ever gets an opportunity to present at an undergrad conference should present at an undergrad conference,” said Hunter. “It was one of the coolest and most welcoming environments I’ve ever been in. Like, everyone was just so excited to listen to everyone else.”
Hunter’s paper was originally written for a Victorian literature course, and it explores queer relationships between highly religious women in Victorian times. The main authors they focused on were Christina Rossetti and Michael Field—a pseudonym for authors Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper. “People were really supportive of everyone because it was an undergrad conference, so they were excited that we wanted to participate,” said Hunter, “And so once I saw other people present I was like ‘oh, not that nervous anymore actually, I think I got this, I did a lot of research and I’m excited to talk about it, and mostly it was a really good experience.”