Professor Edyta Oczkowicz

The phrase “Strong Black Woman” has become very harmful for Black women everywhere, causing us not to feel like we are allowed to ask for...

Whether ‘you’ need to save the princess or debate a choice between A or B, second-person perspective is a fundamentally persuasive style of storytelling that...

The story of La Llorona is a folktale that has existed at least since the fall of Tenochtitlan and the character has remained a persistent...

This project examines the reconfiguration of myth, legend, and folklore to subvert cultural expectations of gendered performance in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch.” Spivak’s...

This oral history project offers analysis into the work and embodiment of women in the southern Appalachian region. Using a regional-focus, the project centers on...

In professional writing, meaning is not something that can be made in isolation - it is inherited by the interpretive communities that engage with it...

The recent proliferation of AI-generated writing raises questions for many sectors of academia, especially writing centers and their student clientele. This presentation will explore the...

As a writer and a feminine-presenting person, I have always been drawn to horror fiction as a way to explore personal experiences and the cultural...

Blue has captivated the imagination across civilizations for millennia, shaping art, culture, and scientific innovation. This presentation explores the paradox of blue: ever-present yet historically...

This paper is the culmination of a senior project for English and Writing Studies. Drawing on the researcher’s previous experience with trauma study, it explores...

This senior project analyzes William Faulkner’s short story, A Rose for Emily, using literary feminist theory critical concepts such as translation of language through embodiment...

Thornton Wilder, an accomplished and exceptional American writer, was frequently influenced by Greco-Roman antiquity. Over the course of my senior research, I have examined the...

Female characters across literature who are written to represent youth, beauty, innocence, love, and overall femininity, are often analyzed as weak, but I argue there...

When discussing Thorton Wilder, often the conversation is centered around his most famous plays, but his early novels are ripe with interesting characters, locations, and...

In my senior research project, I analyze Thornton Wilder's narrators in his novels The Cabala (1926) and Theophilus North (1973). Because these two novels mark...

Within the massive field of Shakespearean studies, a new wave of revisionist interpretations and studies has exploded in visibility, encouraging intersectional analysis of the Bard’s...

Universally, we have recognized that colonialism has a negative impact on those who are colonized, and that the effects still echo through political and economic...

A recent influx of psychological thrillers written by Black American women explores a range of topics pertaining to plotlines that are psychologically traumatic to the...

Literature is instrumental in exacting change both politically and personally, but it can also cause immense harm. A majority of novels that are celebrated for...

Twentieth-century American writer Thornton Wilder believed that “if you take up the complete letters…and if you are patient and watchful you will see another plane...