Papers and More Papers

As I prepare to leave town for the AAH conference in Manchester (that's the original British Manchester, not one of those upstart Manchesters that seem to exist in every eastern state here), my Intro to Modern students are in the throes of preparing their class papers.
They have the option of doing either an article comparison, which is intended to hone their analytical skills, or a research paper on a topic to be approved by me. The first time I taught this class, there were quite a few research papers, some of them remarkably good. Last semester there were not very many and some of those were evidently by students who needed further guidance on just what a research paper is, but there were also some outstanding papers. This semester the research papers will again be rather few, but I think they will be good. I will be getting one on Czech cubism, one on Croatian naive painting, one on the relationship of gay sexuality to the work of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, one on Picasso's Blue Period (this is an alluring topic for students, I have noticed), one on Magritte and philosophy, one on Magritte and Dali (I wait to see exactly where this goes), one on Abstract Expressionism, and one on Malevich and Suprematism.
A few papers will be coming in tomorrow to give me something to read on the plane, but most of them, I am sure, will be appearing in my box next Tuesday.
My Realism and Impressionism students have already done all their papers, while the Czech Modernism seminar has just turned in their rough drafts, which I have not had any time to examine. I suppose I might read those on the plane too.