Meet Our Majors

Danae Younge
Hanna Lou Rathouz
Jimmy Miller
Jane Walker

Danae Younge

Hometown: Chapel Hill, NC
Major: English Literature, creative writing focus

What was your motivation to major in English? 

I have wanted to be a writer for most of my life, so majoring in English was a great way of nourishing this dream. There have been many moments that reinforced this as the right path for me, but a particularly memorable one was when my first poetry book, Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots, received a national award and got accepted for publication. One of the creative writing professors at Oxy had helped me organize and fine tune the poems in that collection before I submitted it, so I was grateful to be under the English Department’s wing.

Can you describe your senior comps project?

For my senior comps, I analyzed intertextuality and the use of redaction in Tom Phillips’s A Humument, one of the first ever collections of blackout poetry. Throughout my paper, I deciphered the intertextual relationship between A Humument and its original source material, William Mallock’s A Human Document, ultimately identifying redaction as a method for excavating thematic love and lust within the novel. Not every college would give students the freedom to tackle such an unconventional text for a final comprehensive, so I am grateful that Oxy gave me that freedom.

You can tell everyone in the major truly wants to produce great work, so it’s really a team encouraging each other and the program’s academic rigor is driven by students, not just professors.

How has the liberal arts approach helped to shape your professional ambitions?

Now that I work as a resident teaching artist through Americorps’s Artistyear program, I must constantly consider how my specific passion for creative writing can be relevantly integrated into other areas of study. It is my job to collaborate with teachers across many subjects within my service school. While I am grateful to have a job that directly relates to my major, having a liberal arts education helps me introduce my specific expertise to broader systems of education more seamlessly.

What is the vibe of the English department?

The English professors at Oxy are intelligent, deep thinkers and expect the same from their students. You would expect to be intimidated by them, yet they manage to cultivate an atmosphere that is surprisingly homey and welcoming. You can tell everyone in the major truly wants to produce great work so it is really more of a team encouraging each other and the program’s academic rigor is driven by students, not just professors.

 

Hanna Lou Rathouz

Hometown: Austin, TX 
Major: English, minor: history

What was your motivation to major in English? 

I have always enjoyed reading, writing, and analyzing texts in a group setting or with specific guidance. However, the moment that solidified my dedication to the English department was taking Professor Neti's course Introduction to Literary Methods. At first, I expected to be bored by the class but Professor Neti truly turned reading theory into a comprehensive, engaging, and community-based activity. I found connection with other English students through her class, and the texts we studied became a foundation for the rest of my studies within and outside of the English department. Every liberal arts student dreams of participating in a true discussion based class absent of inaccessible theory or judgment and that is what this course offered.

Can you describe your working relationships with English professors?

The English department as a whole is a powerhouse at Occidental. Each professor is passionate about their area of expertise and possesses the skill to take a text that may seem lacking in complexity and make it interesting. For me, Professor Lerner and Paradise Lost are perfect examples of this occurrence. Personally, I am not always a fan of epic poetry so Paradise Lost did not sound like it would be up my alley. However, over the course of class discussions, and further conversations with Professor Lerner outside of class I became very attached to the text and genuinely enjoyed working through it. Professor Lerner is adept at encouraging students to develop a connection with each piece of writing he covers and is wonderful to chat with during his office hours.

Do you have any advice for a student considering a major in English?

My advice to any student considering an English major is to talk! Reach out to your professors, go to their office hours, and ask about any concerns with a text or even advice on internships, careers, etc. Chat with other students in your classes; I have met so many lovely friends from the major who I then study with later or walk to class with. Though it can be intimidating I would also encourage you to talk during class, sometimes it's part of your grade, but mostly, I find that lively conversation bonds all the students together resulting in a cheerful and judgment-free environment. 

The English department as a whole is a powerhouse at Occidental. Each professor is passionate about their area of expertise and possesses the skill to take a text that may seem lacking in complexity and make it interesting.

What are your ambitions post-Oxy and how has the liberal arts approach helped to shape these ambitions?

After Oxy, I would love to go to law school, although I'm not sure what type of law I am interested in. Being an English major has encouraged me to look at a career, such as law, that involves critical analysis, reading comprehension, and structural argumentation.

 

Jimmy Miller

Hometown: Palo Alto, CA 
Major: English, minor: biology

What was your motivation to major in English? Are there any standout classes you’ve taken?

I read voraciously as a kid and when I got to Oxy I knew I wanted to be an English major, but then I got sidetracked. I took a zoology course my first semester and it fascinated me. By the spring semester of my sophomore year I realized, in part due to my experiences as a reporter for The Occidental, that I wanted my education at Occidental to be a thoroughly political one in the classroom as well as outside of it. I wasn't completely satisfied studying science and I took two English classes that semester which differed vastly: Professor Ford's American Experience in Literature, which followed America's wars and imperial ambitions through poetry, and Professor Neti's course on Race, Law and Literature in the Victorian era. Each course's subject matter couldn't have been more dissimilar at a first pass—after all, what does confederate poetry have to do with Dickens' Great Expectations? But I found the unique styles of analysis that each professor used fascinating, and I began to relate texts from one course to the other. By this point it felt natural to change my major from biology to English.

Have you taken part in any student research opportunities at Oxy or elsewhere?

Last summer I contributed to a doctoral student's research of the biomechanical relationships in the lower back through a research experience for undergraduates (REU) program in the Radiological Sciences Laboratory at Stanford University. Writing an essay is definitely different from writing code, but my courses in the English department taught me how to clearly convey the focus of my project, which was writing a program to calculate spinal curvature from CT scans more accurately. While not academic research, I also serve as the editor-in-chief of The Occidental and I consider journalism to be an accessible type of research, if less nuanced. For a feature about the discontinuation of Oxy's football program I synthesized a dozen voices of former players, coaches and college administrators, and this work dovetails with what I think most people would consider theory-based academic research.  

Writing an essay is definitely different from writing code, but my courses in the English department taught me how to clearly convey the focus of my project, which was writing a program to calculate spinal curvature from CT scans more accurately.

What are your ambitions post-Oxy and how has the liberal arts approach helped to shape these ambitions?

I'm a more thorough thinker and a better writer because of Occidental. The college has allowed me to explore my academic and personal interests fearlessly, and after graduation I hope to work as a local journalist in LA and then attend medical school. I aspire to be a doctor that listens to patients in order to treat them as people, rather than mere bodies in need of fixing. The critical and curious professors in the English department—through the texts they teach that depict characters in myriad societal positions and social conundrums as well as their time that they graciously share during office hours—have refined my ability to do this.

Jane Walker 

Hometown: Portland OR 
Major: English

Can you describe your working relationships with English professors? Are there any standout classes you’ve taken?

One of the most exciting things about the English department at Occidental is the intimacy undergraduates can develop with their professors. I'm currently pursuing my PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University, and many of the other candidates in my cohort did not have the same depth of relationships with their mentors that I developed through the course of my undergraduate career. Professor Lerner especially was a defining character in my pursuit of a BA; my first class with him on Renaissance Poetry is the reason I considered the major in the first place. We had many long, rambling exchanges in email and office hours that led to my summer research on Milton. I eventually used the paper I wrote as a culmination of that research as my writing sample when applying to graduate programs. 

Have you taken part in any student research opportunities at Oxy or elsewhere? 

My summer research project was born out of an email exchange with Professor Lerner regarding Neitszche's "On the Genealogy of Morality," a text I read for a class offered by CTSJ. I was frustrated by the centrality of power as an inherent and inescapable premise for human sociality. I saw glimmers of the relationship between Nietszche's dilemma (empowering the submissive position through morality makes any outcome other than martyrdom despicable) and Eve's frequent and uncomfortable submission to Adam in Paradise Lost. Professor Lerner helped to clarify how Milton's model of hierarchy as unnatural or imposed on Paradise might make legible an idealized horizontal relationship of sociality without differential power. The focus of my summer research and senior comps ended up being a scene in Paradise Lost where Eve regards her reflection as an alien other, and acts out a simulacrum of "perfect" sociality untainted by difference as a mark of hierarchy. 

I'm currently pursuing my PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University, and many of the other candidates in my cohort did not have the same depth of relationships with their mentors that I developed through the course of my undergraduate career.

What do you find most compelling about studying English?

When I think about this question I think about the scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep/Anna Wintour takes Anne Hathaway to task on the complicated origins of her cerulean blue sweater. Her point is that style trickles down through markets so that even a clueless shopper like the Anne Hathaway character has been invisibly guided by the instincts of designers. Despite the elitism of this sentiment (I'd argue that the influence goes both ways, from designer to public AND from public to designer) it does a good job of evoking the traces of intention just barely present in even the most mindless acts of consumption. When you study English, you realize that ideas and language work the same way—seemingly mindless assumptions, formulations, even affects can be traced back to intentional, politically inscribed theories and fictions. The choice is not whether we are touched by these fictions—that is inevitable—but whether we take the time to examine them. 

Do you have any advice for a student considering a major in English?

Don't let pragmatic concerns get you down. There is just as little demand for a highly theoretical mathematician as there is for an English professor. In the same way that being good with numbers can translate to a career, being a capable and thoughtful communicator is a marketable skill. Ultimately, a bachelor's degree is a bachelor's degree. Major in whatever you think is interesting.

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