The Last Post of the Semester :(

On Monday, our final class of the semester, we were able to share our research with our peers and provide feedback on our proposed thesis for our final paper. I found the presentations to be really interesting because they allow us to learn more about our peers’ interests, and I learned that there were many students who were researching the New Women. I also found that I was the only one doing a biography, which really surprised me, I thought that there was going to be more students who would take the opportunity to be peer-reviewed and published.

Though I initially took the opportunity to write a biography for the possibility of getting more of my writing published, I found myself loving the research I was doing to get to know my author. I think the biography offers a unique opportunity to learn about the author (in my case, Victoria Cross) as a complete person, as opposed to just studying her work. Which offers this sense of intimacy, and ‘realism’ that we often don’t get doing a literary analysis. I found myself really excited to learn about her personal life and to learn about how her personal life connected to her career. Further, my research has taken me to observe historical artifacts – and there is something really cool about looking at these old letters, diary entries, and periodicals. I can see the ‘big picture’ because I can look at all these different parts of Cross’s life, and understand how they influenced her to be the person and author that she was.

This class has allowed me to learn so many new things, such as WordPress, HTML coding, and writing a biography. I also want to make a shout out to Val Lem the graduate librarian representative for teaching me how to properly research and navigate databases.