Month: August 2021

The Department of English is delighted to spotlight a selection of summer achievements from our amazing undergraduate students!

Sophia Bereaud Creative Writing and Anthropology Emory University, Class of 2022 Pronouns: She/Her

As a member of the SURE Affiliate program this summer, I worked with Professor Heather Christle to produce a piece of creative nonfiction exploring the relationship between mental illness and creativity. The premise arose from my interest in mania, a state of mind characteristic of bipolar disorder, which begins with elevated mood and energy levels and devolves into psychosis. Early manic phases can be marked by sudden overwhelming creative ambition. I was intrigued by the possibility of a linkage between these two phenomena, which would bear interestingly on the veracity of the ‘mad genius’ and ‘suffering artist’ stereotypes. I quickly found statistical evidence pointing to a far higher prevalence of the illness among artistic populations compared to general samples – about 20 percent to 1 percent, respectively. Moreover, many of the symptoms of hypomania – ebullience, grandiosity, goal-driven behavior, ‘flow’ state – strikingly resemble those of creative states of mind. So while there’s no conclusive neurological evidence, the possibility of a catalytic link between bipolar disorder and artistic production is a viable and highly contested research question.

My research, both of scientific and literary bents, frames the narration of a manic flight.  Knowing my curiosity was upheld by the scientific community, I set out to humanize the inquiry with anecdotal evidence from the experiences of artists and creatives. I read works by artists with bipolar disorder, including those who treat the subject of their own illness, in fiction, poetry, and prose. I read about the lives of some of these artists, namely Virginia Woolf and August Strindberg, hoping to understand how bipolar disorder colored their creative lives. Their stories served as contrasts and referents as I unfurled my narrative. I make use of interstitial prose to weave research, reflection, and storytelling together. The piece begins at the start of a manic episode and ends with the episode’s finale, paying visits to despair, euphoria, high school, the 19th century, and the inside of a Childish Gambino album on the way. Its narrator is sometimes lucid, sometimes patently insane. It is an exercise in navel-gazing, aspiring to writer Melissa Febos’ take on the term: “I suspect I could write something relevant and dynamic and political and beautiful and intellectual about my own navel.”

The Department of English is delighted to spotlight a selection of summer achievements from our amazing undergraduate students!

Laila Nashid English and Sociology Emory University, Class of 2023 Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

Being both an author and an undergraduate student has been an incredibly rewarding experience. I fell in love with writing through reading, which was fostered through weekly trips to my local library as a child. There, I became a fan of the Angelina Ballerina series, so much so that I started writing Angelina Ballerina fanfiction at the age of five (though I did not know it was fanfiction at the time). My writing has since transformed into working on original young adult novels.

My debut is a young adult (YA) contemporary novel titled You Truly Assumed, which releases February 8, 2022 with Inkyard Press, a young adult imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. I like to think of it as the Netflix show Dear White People meets Love, Hate, & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed, and it follows three Black Muslim teens as they navigate the summer before their senior year and the world of online activism. I started writing You Truly Assumed during my junior year of high school. This was around the time when the Muslim Ban was in the news and anti-Muslim hate was really being discussed due to how it was being used in politics. Additionally, growing up in the DC area and going to school in the city meant that politics was always in the background in my daily life. I think I was also processing the results of the 2016 election, and what that meant for me as a young Black Muslim woman.

As a Black Muslim woman author in a white male dominated industry, I’ve sought out spaces and connections where I am able to be surrounded or engaged with people who share similar backgrounds. Because publishing is such a white space, I’ve found it important to be able to support and to be supported by authors of color, especially Black authors. There has been progress in the industry, which I can tell just based on the difference between the books I had growing up and all the books that are being published now. But there is still a long way to go. One valuable lesson that I’ve learned is the importance of lifting as you climb. I was really grateful to have authors who saw me and recognized the value in You Truly Assumed. They shared a lot of their time and energy with me, and that’s something that I definitely want to continue to pay forward. A lot of times in publishing, and other primarily white spaces, there’s this narrative that there’s only room for one Black person. But the reality is that there’s room for all of us, and I think lifting others up really pushes back against that narrative.

While I’m still striving to find a balance between writing and academics and adjusting to being back on campus, I’m excited that You Truly Assumed releases during the spring semester and that Emory will be a part of my debut experience.

Summer 2022 Update!

Laila Nashid has been selected as a 2022 Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute Fellow. This six-week residential program is for rising seniors interested in pursuing a PhD in the Humanities. Students attend morning seminars with distinguished research scholars, attend discussions of assigned readings, and conduct research in the Schomburg Center.

The program invites students to explore how the past is influencing the present and how the present can shape the future.

Institute fellows explore a variety of disciplines (including history, literature, arts, religion, and cultural studies) and historical periods. The Fellows examine questions about identity, culture, arts, gender, migrations, mental health, and criminal justice, and reflect on how they will affect the future.

Drawing upon the Schomburg Center’s extensive collections the students prepare a research prospectus that could be the basis for their senior thesis or a major research paper. 

This summer, Emory partnered with Plympton, a San Francisco-based literary studio that focuses on innovation in publishing, to offer paid internships to thirteen students, most of them English majors. Plympton works across a range of practices, from story format to book cover design to library licenses to writer compensation. It is also building a database of short stories, called the Writing Atlas, which includes rich information about each story, such as plot summaries and reader annotations, to help understand why some stories have been successful and how some might also be successful as TV or film adaptations. It aspires to be the world’s most comprehensive database of short stories.

Emory student interns each read approximately one hundred and twenty short stories this summer, most from the history of the Best American Short Story series, and prepared accounts of them for the Writing Atlas. In addition, they had opportunities to meet with industry professionals. Each week, Plympton hosted figures working in a range of positions to speak with and take questions from the interns, which allowed them to explore possible careers. Finally, Plympton invited interns to share their particular passions and helped them find special projects to take on, which included working with adaptation rights from literature to film, designing ebook covers, and writing treatments of novels for Hollywood producers.

The Department of English is delighted to spotlight Elizabeth Hsieh’s participation in the internship, read her reflections below!

Elizabeth Hsieh English Major Emory University, Class of 2023 Pronouns: She/Her

I had the pleasure of working as an Emory Fellow for Plympton Literary Studio over the summer. As part of a new program with the English department, the interns from Emory helped with the development of a database for short stories, the Writing Atlas. Going into the summer, I was not sure if any opportunities related to my English major would be available during all the craziness with COVID. I was skeptical of online internships and questioned whether they would allow me to get real experience, but working with Plympton was extremely hands-on. My favorite part was getting to explore areas in the literary world that I had never considered before. As an English major, I often get questioned about what my professional plans are following college. Many people have the idea that the only options are graduate school or working as an educator. My internship really opened my eyes to the creative, engaging, and multidisciplinary opportunities that are available to English majors. They invited leaders and businesswomen and men from multiple industries to have small zoom discussions each week. It was so fun to learn about fields that I did not even know existed, such as agencies and management companies specifically for adaptation. Plympton also supported me in exploring my personal interests in law and publishing. When I told the project managers that I was feeling a bit stuck between the two areas, they allowed me to see contracts and even explained legal concepts to help me get a better feel of that type of work.  

Another part of the internship I loved was getting to apply the knowledge and skills I have picked up in my classes. The Emory Fellows mainly focused on creating summaries for all the Best American Short Stories published since the 1940s. We also wrote tags for the stories and wrote loglines. As I read through the stories, it was so satisfying to find a story that fit into a certain literary movement or genre I had previously learned about. For example, I took a Southern Literature class with Professor Ladd, and it came in handy so many times when reading stories from southern writers. I found myself recognizing core themes and trends and being able to fit the story into a greater picture. I know that without that class, I might have blown right past some symbolic moments when writing my summaries. My classes also prepared me to deal with stories that had more sensitive themes of race, slavery, gender, or sexuality. Being informed about the context in which certain stories were written made me feel a bit more comfortable and clear-sighted. Overall, the database we worked on is meant to help others understand the gist of a story without having to read it themselves, so it was great to be able to point out core themes, motifs, and other details that went beyond the basic plot. As a student who has benefited a great deal from literary databases, I found it truly gratifying to apply my knowledge from Emory to help someone else’s research on professional projects.

The Department of English is delighted to spotlight a selection of summer achievements from our amazing undergraduate students!

Jack Wolfram English and Creative Writing Emory University, Class of 2022 Pronouns: He/Him/His

As a SURE research fellow, I’ve spent the past ten-weeks conducting full-time independent research under the direction of Dr. Cahill. My project, which builds upon her published work, is entitled “A Fitting Scene for Unusual Capabilities: Adrienne Herndon’s Trailblazing Black Theatrical Mobilization Across the Jim Crow South.” My work is prompted by my interest in Black theatre and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement’s unprecedented surge in 2020, which spurred the United States to acknowledge and address its deep-rooted racism. By 2021, long-overdue investigations into suppressed Black history have gained increasing attention within scholarly spheres and popular culture. The groundbreaking but tragically-short life of the Atlanta theater maker Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century is one such marginalized story. In the late 1800s, she cultivated a promising performance reputation in the North while earning multiple academic degrees; when racism prematurely ended these exploits, she returned south to helm the drama department at Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University. As the faculty’s lone African-American woman, she established unprecedented access to serious drama for Georgia’s Black communities before her untimely death in 1910, radically reclaiming Shakespearian performance as the “birthright […] of the American Negro” and using theater as a means to bring together diverse populations of Black theater makers in resistance to White supremacy.

Drawing upon Dr. Cahill’s scholarship, I set out to find out more about how Herndon mobilized Black audiences in the Jim Crow South beyond Atlanta. Working with Emory Librarian Erica Bruchko, I made a plan to research contemporary Black periodicals, university bulletins, event fliers, similar records, and secondary sources in the online and physical archives of Emory University, Clark Atlanta University, the HBCU Library Alliance, and Auburn Avenue Research Library. My uncovered findings thus far document that Herndon undertook a reading and performance tour throughout the South, including stops in Augusta and Savannah as well as in Aiken, South Carolina, and going as far north as Chattanooga, Tennessee. Not only do these findings invite further exploration, but my research may also help expand Dr. Cahill’s perspectives about Black protest – specifically, that resistance to White supremacy was carried out not only by political organizations, but also through cultural productions and pedagogy. It furthermore enables us to realize the complex politics of Shakespeare performance, given Shakespeare’s place as a longtime White status symbol as well as a medium of Black resistance.

The Department of English is delighted to spotlight a selection of summer achievements from our amazing undergraduate students!

Becca Cohen Biology and English Emory University, Class of 2023 Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

At the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) in Staunton, Virginia, audience members are part of the performance. Don’t worry, you don’t have to memorize any lines–but Merchant of Venice’s Portia may point to you while she declares her suitors unsuitable! Because the ASC replicates early modern conditions, some lucky playgoers can sit on the stage in the “Lord’s Chairs” that are part of their recreation of the Elizabethan theater known as Blackfriars. In this indoor theater, lights remain on during the show, so audiences cannot hide in the dark as they can in most modern productions. This type of performance allows for eye contact and–as research has shown– it results in an emotional reaction in participants, which of course enhances everyone’s theater experience. 

This summer I have been lucky enough to be fully immersed in the ASC experience as an educational intern. In this internship, I’ve come to rely on skills I’ve honed in English classes. I’m especially grateful for what I’ve learned in Dr. Cahill’s classes about early modern drama, intimacy choreography, and early modern historical contexts (from aristocratic hunting practices to sorcery and witchcraft) because I’ve drawn on this knowledge as I have analyzed different plays, props, and acting choices. And I’m thrilled to have opportunities to learn more from other Shakespeareans at the ASC, including my supervisor in the education department, Sarah Enloe, and Aubrey Whitlock, who co-hosts the Hurly Burly Shakespeare Podcast.

 So far, I’ve seen Macbeth in an outdoor theater space and Henry V in the Blackfriars. I have also gotten covered in stage blood at a workshop with young children; helped teach early modern rhetoric and meter to college students; attended rehearsals and later provided dramaturgical input to actors (for example, I weighed in on the current production of Henry V set in the grunge era of the 1990s and starring Brandon Carter, an extraordinary actor of color who has appeared in several Shakespeare history plays); analyzed ongoing productions in my blogs; taught administrative staff how to write blog entries; wrote play pitches for future seasons; helped graduate students find resources for their research; absorbed new information from the vast film archives of past productions; and even interviewed actors about how their BIPOC and LGBTQ+ identities affected the decisions they made on stage. It has been very cool to see how vital the skills I developed in my Emory English courses are to my intern experience.