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MILLIGAN COLLEGE, TN (March 31, 2003) — Over 60 undergraduate students from 10 colleges and universities throughout the Southern Appalachian Region will participate in this year’s 10th annual Blue Ridge Undergraduate Research Conference hosted at Milligan College on Friday, April 11. They will present papers on topics ranging from environmental studies to gender and literature, educational psychology, historical theology, and military history.
While academic research was once solely the domain of professors or graduate students, undergraduates are now tackling this academic realm with zeal, explained Dr. Joy Drinnon, conference chair and assistant professor of psychology at Milligan.
The trend started gaining widespread national popularity in 1998 when the Boyer Commission, an 11-member team of academic and educational professionals, issued a report urging research universities to include undergraduates in research. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Undergraduate research strengthens the students’ academic experience and enables them to contribute to society and academia in various ways,” said Drinnon. “This is a high quality but low pressure conference to encourage rather than discourage students to research, write, and present papers in their disciplines.”
This year’s keynote speaker is Kingsport, Tenn., native Dr. John Shelton Reed, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For 12 years, Reed was the director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC. He also helped to found the university’s Center for the Study of the American South.
Reed did his undergraduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University before going to Chapel Hill in 1969. He has written or edited over a dozen books, including 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. His articles have appeared in professional and popular periodicals ranging from Science to Southern Living.
He is a contributing writer for the Oxford American and a founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures. Reed has received a number of prizes and awards, including election to the Fellowship of Southern Writers and honorary degrees from the University of the South and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
To find out more about the BRURC at Milligan, contact Dr. Ted Thomas at 423-461-8996 or go to www.milligan.edu/BRURC.