Emily Grace, ‘18

Emily Grace (B. A. 2018; she/her) is a former English major who is now a doctoral candidate in Literature at the Catholic University of America as well as the Editor in Chief of the online literary journal Literary Matters.  Here she relates the story of her path from UMBC to doctoral work:

At UMBC, I studied English on the literature track and was a member of the Humanities Scholars Program and the Honors College. With the encouragement of the English faculty, I participated in the English Honors Program and wrote a creative project on Elizabeth Bishop’s revision process. The research I did in ENGL399/499 convinced me that I wanted to spend more time thinking about archival research and the messy process of creating great work.

I am grateful to so many members of the English faculty for their encouragement of this project and the ways in which they shaped my approach to language and literature, particularly Lia Purpura and Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci. Dr. DiCuirci was the professor who first encouraged me to submit a proposal to the English Honors Program after reading through a bleak analysis of feminine legacy in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and she later served as one of the committee members for my thesis and wrote me letters of recommendation for graduate school, for which I am forever grateful. Lia taught me how to read poetry well, and even as I pivoted away from creative writing and toward critical analysis, she encouraged me to “keep the seedling-love [I] have for the word alive.” I took a screenshot of the email she sent with this quote, and I look at it whenever I feel overwhelmed by my current project. UMBC’s English department gave me the tools and the encouragement I needed to both find and enjoy my graduate studies, and I am forever thankful for the time I spent as one of its students.

My research focus has shifted since I started my graduate work, but the desire to know more about how writers create has remained. I am now finishing a dissertation on music, affect, and amateurism in the works of James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Djuna Barnes. During my time in graduate school, I’ve had the opportunity to present my research on these figures at a number of conferences, teach on the intersections of music and modernism, and travel abroad with Notre Dame University for research on Joyce. I currently edit Literary Matters, an online literary journal associated with the Association of Literary Scholars. Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), work as the office assistant for the ALSCW, and teach first-year composition courses at Catholic and George Washington University.