Hannah Hinsch recently got in touch with the department to report on what she’s been up to since graduating last June.
“Currently, I’m hard at work on my graduate school application for next fall, which (surprise) involves a lot of writing (and reading–so much reading),” Hannah said in an email. “For my writing sample, I’m adapting a paper I wrote for Dr. Maier’s seminar on Modernism last winter; the paper examines Katherine Anne Porter’s short story ‘Flowering Judas’ and how it deconstructs, in a way bordering on iconoclasm, the use of women’s bodies as religious icons.
“During grad school, I hope to really bolster my scholarship and cultivate my love of studying lit as a perpetual learner. I hope to meet more scholars in my field, both budding and seasoned, and build a network of people with which to share my passions (a network I have also found at SPU).”
As for her time as a student in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Hannah had this to say: “I loved being an English major[. . . .] [C]ritical inquiry and attentiveness to language required of anyone studying English are skills that I want to make my life mission to engage. Studying English doesn’t just mean you like reading; studying literature, asking questions of it, responding to it, provides you with a way of being in the world and encountering discourses. It’s amazing what a love of reading and writing can become, and the broader conversations that you can join from the hundreds of years of scholarly thinking on writers that continue to move us.”
Thanks for the insights, Hannah, and best wishes on the grad-school applications!