Undergraduate student Sarah Freeman's award winning project

The Department of English & Film Studies has a solid track record of success at supporting undergraduate research via the Roger S. Smith awards and summer 2024 was no exception.  Sarah Freeman, a B.A. student in English, created a project entitled “Access to Experience in Goodreads Reviews of Trans Life Writing.”  Sarah’s research was inspired by her experience of working with Professor Mike O’Driscoll on the SpokenWeb project and studying readers and reading cultures in ENGL 398: Histories of Reading, taught in Winter 2024 by Professor Danielle Fuller.

Sarah Freeman’s project, supervised by Professor Fuller, focused on how Goodreads users respond to life writing by transgender authors. By studying reader response at the intersection of life writing and gender identity, she examined how both of these factors influence readers’ perceptions of social norms, such as the public and the private, disclosure, and intimacy. Goodreads reviews, themselves often a form of life writing, proved to demonstrate how readers respond to life writing in both a critical and emotional matter.

The project output includes a research poster, an essay, and an audio introduction. Access each of these via the following link: https://linktr.ee/sarah.freeman 

The Roger S Smith undergraduate researcher awards enable students to undertake their own research project during the summer months (mid-May to mid-August).  Students are paid $5000 for approximately 330 hours of work.  They are supervised by an active researcher who is a member of Continuing Faculty with relevant expertise.