This video contains a quick explanation of the inspiration and process behind my English comps project, This Body, Unbound, as well as a reading of two poems. The project was intended to center the voices of Twin Cities and Northfield’s transgender community members, their experiences with transness, and the joy…
Hi all. Thanks for tuning in! I’m just going to talk briefly and generally about my comps research into Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the interesting ways in which Rushdie manipulates and exposes notions of national history and the narrative time of the nation. Please excuse me for the overabundance…
A discussion between Mica Bahn, Meredith Oldham, Yoni Rekem, Claire Seymour and Gab Torres, all of whom wrote creative comps. All of us worked together as a workshop group to critique each other’s pieces and then improve upon them, so we’re all fairly familiar with everyone’s work. In this Q…
The students in the colloquium comps group met twice a week to talk about works that the English department had previously assigned on the theme, “Imagining the Nation”. These works were from different periods, from all over the world, and in different genres. We watched movies and plays and read…
While public approaches to commemoration in Northern Ireland, such as the extensive mural tradition, are often defined by “sectarian constructs of society which reify an essentialist identity,” the more private and personal realm of fiction allows diverse voices to be represented in the public memory and perception (Graham and Whelan…
Mythos is a collection of short stories that all invoke a fantastical creature/person in their narratives. Each story in the collection is intended to unsettle certain societal norms that deal with gender, success, failure, relationships, and home, respectively. The use of fantastical creatures was an attempt to come at these…
Long Shadows is an ecohistorical graphic memoir. Let’s break that down really quick: The graphic memoir genre is what it sounds like– the combination of the graphic novel form with creative nonfiction or memoir. My project deals primarily with environmental history, hence the prefix. Essentially, it’s a comic about my…
Shakespeare’s Richard II is a singularly interesting piece of the Shakespearean canon. It is the only one of his plays for which there is clear, specific historical evidence of censorship, due to its politically charged content. In particular, the section of Act Four, Scene One which involves the King’s appearance…
The title of my comps was “Alternative Truth and Narrative Freedoms in Vietnam War Literature.” I examine the use of autofictional devices in Tim O’ Brien’s The Things They Carried and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For which allow the narrators to construct a single…
For my comps I wrote a 17,000 word novella called “At This Time a Queen Shall Be Burned.” It’s about Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, who was executed in 1536 for alleged adultery, incest, and treason. Specifically, I focus on the two weeks she spent as…
