Writing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mother is a poet, and so I grew up surrounded by her strewn-around notebooks and with a sense that writing can be an expression of identity. It has always been my strong suit academically, and I’ve found that the assignments that I’ve been proudest of thus far in my college career have all been essays. I am also the Arts Editor for The Emory Wheel, so I’m used to writing analytically and carefully reading and editing the work of our writers. I tend to like courses where I can engage with the material in a way that leads me to produce my own material through methods such as critique or analysis.
In this course, I’d like to work on understanding how to approach academic articles in fields like queer theory. I feel like often when it comes to readings in the liberal arts, I’m hit with a wall of academic jargon and references to works I have never read that it often takes me a few re-reads of a sentence to truly understand the point that the author is making. I would like to broaden my vocabulary and field of references in order to engage with texts like these fully.