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On October 30th and 31st of 2026, Colorado Mesa University's Department of Languages, Literature, and Mass Communication (LLMC) is hosting a conference for undergraduate students in the humanities.

The LLAMAS (Languages, Literature, and Mass Communication Symposium) Conference aims to help undergraduate students to gain professional academic experience, develop their intellectual confidence, and deepen their learning by being exposed to a diverse collection of others' work.

Students are invited to present papers, audio/visual projects, reflections on creative work, and other projects pertaining to the humanities.

REGISTER TODAY!

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Rachel HartnettDr. Rachel Hartnett Presents: "(Post)Colonial Monsters: Zombies and Vampires and Dragons, Oh My!" 

Rachel M. Hartnett, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Arts and Sciences at the College of Coastal Georgia. Her research interests include American literature, postcolonialism, U.S. empire, popular culture, and adaptation studies. She has been published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Adaptation Today, eTropic, and South Atlantic Review in the “Whose Adaptation is It Anyway?” essay cluster, which she co-edited. Currently, she has a forthcoming chapter on Trinidadian vampire myths and American military occupation in The Palgrave Handbook of Monsters and Monstrous Bodies. She is also co-editing an anthology, (Re)Making Multiplicities: Twenty-First Century Adaptations of Multiethnic American Literatures, under advanced contract with SUNY Press; other upcoming work includes a monograph project on race and postcolonialism in the A Song of Ice and Fire series as well as a co-written project on representations of masculinity in American war adaptations.

Dr. Shawn MillerDr. Shawn Miller Presents: “Beasts in the Machine: Wild Life and Wild Agency at the Dawn of the Anthropocene” 
Professor Shawn Miller joined the history department in 1997 soon after completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He specializes in the environmental history of Brazil and Latin America. His publications include Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World’s Longest Highway (University of California Press, 2026); The Street is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, 2018); An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge, 2007), which won the Melville Book Prize; and Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford, 2000). His current research examines both public transit and animal conservation in Brazil. He has served as chair of the history department and as associate dean for research in the College of Family Home and Social Sciences. For a decade, he chaired Provo City’s Agricultural Commission, which works to preserve local farmland. 
 

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