On Friday, April 19 at 11:00 am in the Weisz Room of the Maples (110), outgoing MHC Undergraduate Fellow Iris Loehr, an English major in the Honors College, will present on her project “The Bridge is Jammed with Mountain People: Essays on Place in Central Appalachia” by Iris Loehr as part of UMaine’s Women in Philosophy conference. By blending creative and academic styles, Loehr’s project explores human interaction with the region’s geography and geology to develop a narrative of Appalachian identity that runs counter to the ones driven by stigma. In the popular imagination, Appalachia is a site of poverty, incest and strife. Online characterizations of Appalachia portray it as a place filled with cannibals, killers, and spirits that haunt the woods deep in the mountains. Loehr’s project challenges the stigmas drawn from the region’s systemic poverty and historical isolation by presenting a vision of Appalachian culture that’s vibrant, nuanced and inherently bound to the mountains from which it emerged.
This event is free and open to the public.