Current Research
My current research is geared towards my MA Thesis in literary studies. I focus on female modernist authors of the interwar period including Katharine Burdekin, Mina Loy, Jean Rhys, Djuana Barnes, Hilda Doolittle, and Claude Cahun. I am looking at the way their writing intersects with their historical moment in an effort to analyze and elucidate how their written and lived sexualities and politics could be seen as radically resistance to the hegemonic rise of hyper-masculinity during the interwar period.
Undergraduate Honors Thesis
April 12, 2018: I successfully defended my undergraduate honors thesis, “Women in the Third Reich: Passivity, Action, and Ideology”. The thesis focused on case studies of German women in the Third Reich who participated and resisted the Nazi regime. I argue women who ‘participated’ in the Nazi regime entered a masculine sphere of German society, and had to emulate masculinity in order to enhance their career and social status. I looked at the cases of Leni Riefenstahl, Irma Grese, Hanna Reitsch, Magda Goebbels, Zarah Leander and other prominent figures to show the ways the women were limited and controlled by the gendered nature of the regime, and the ways they operated within it. Similarly, I look at women who resisted the Nazi regime and advocate for a new understanding of resistance; a feminine resistance, that includes non-traditional and clandestine acts. I compare female figures like Sophie Scholl and the women of the Rösenstrasse protests to women who are not included in the traditional narrative using stories and account collected by historian, Claudia Koonz. I argue the connotative understanding of resistance as the man who ‘stands up firm to fight against the enemy for what he believes’ is inherently problematic for historical inquiries into resistance to oppressive regimes and often excludes women.