English major Emi Hall wins 2014-2015 Consortium Library Prize
by Michelle Saport |
UAA English major Emi Hall is the winner of the 2014-2015 Consortium Library Prize. The award, which includes a $500 cash prize, recognizes "an exemplary undergraduate research project which demonstrates evidence of significant scholarly investigation and utilization of library resources, archival as well as electronic." The review committee selected Hall as this year's winner for her research, "Neurowhat? Neurorhetoric: The Marriage of Rhetoric and Neuroscience." The project is a literature review of the interdisciplinary field of neurorhetoric. The paper looks specifically at the area of neurorhetorics concerned with the analysis of language and persuasive power in and around the field of neuroscience. Read Hall's essay at ScholarWorks@UA.
Hall's project started the previous year when her mentor, assistant professor Heather Adams, recommended neurorhetoric as a topic for a class project. It became a subject Hall has become passionate about, and she chose to continue working with it the following fall in English 414: Research Writing. This experience cultivated Hall's research and writing skills, and showed her how a project can extend past a single semester.
Hall was required to submit the paper and a reflective essay for consideration for the Library Prize. For her reflective essay, Hall gave a detailed account of her research processes, the biggest problem she ran into during her research and two major takeaways she gained from completing her project.
The Consortium Library Prize was presented to Hall by Consortium Library Dean Steve Rollins at the Undergraduate Research Awards Ceremony on April 17, 2015, as part of the 2015 Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium.