I'm Kennedy, a literature nerd and creative writer from the outskirts of Memphis. I'm also a senior here at Dartmouth. When I'm not working in admissions as a senior fellow, I'm a student employee at the library and a research and teaching assistant in the English department. I love music (I collect vinyl!) and analyzing teen drama TV (think Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars). I'm currently applying to law schools. I've had such a great time at Dartmouth and am excited to share that with you!
Professor McCann is my advisor, but that's not the only reason I took this class. Since it was a senior seminar with only 9 students, we got to dive deep into the fascinating material, including with Victorian-era pulp fiction books, advertisements, and psychological treatises, plus some good old fashioned canonical works like The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula. [Fun fact: I've read Dracula three times at Dartmouth... it's an English department favorite!]
WinterHanover, NH
This was an off term for me, but I love Hanover so much I hung around anyways! I worked for admissions and Baker-Berry Library, read a ton of J.G. Ballard, and stared out the window at the snow for an embarrassingly long amount of time. I also visited my parents in Tennessee during Christmas.
Professor Nachlis went out of his way to act as an unofficial pre-law advisor for all of us in this class, not only by introducing us to some of the most pressing issues in American government, but also by dedicating the final two weeks of class to a module called "Should you go to law school?" A question I was asking myself!
SummerHanover, NH
Another off term again, and this time I'm working full-time for admissions as a senior fellow! I'm also doing a lot of preliminary reading for my honors thesis. Anyone heard of Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks? Well, I'll have read it twice by the time this term is over.
On Fridays, you can normally find me in the admissions office until noon at least. But not February 23. I took a day off work because I had an exciting two days ahead of me—finally, the Memetics and Mimesis Conference was beginning!
Okay (I hear you saying), slow down. The what? Memetics? Like, as in, memes? A conference about memes? Well, yes. If you want to read more about what that entails and why we're doing it, the English Department posted a great article about it. The long and short of it is that studying English can mean a lot of things, as you can see after a quick scroll through the recent publications of the English faculty. Our study isn't just limited to great works of literature—it extends to all forms of communication, including letters, pulp novels, annotations in books, and, yes, internet communications, which naturally includes memes.
When I took Literary History III with Professor Tanoukhi in the spring of 2023, she mentioned she was pulling together a student group to produce a paper and a talk for a conference in February 2024. A conference about memes, no less. I was immediately interested. I have a lot of amateur interest in digital studies—I wrote a paper on the internet content genre of "cringe," and a lot of my thesis work involves theorizing how technological tools like the internet change our manner of communication. Plus Professor Tanoukhi said there'd be free pizza, and I love pizza.
A small but dedicated group coalesced: myself, Alyssa (a '24), Ethan (a '25), and Xiaoyu (a graduate student). We met once every two weeks for months, reading, writing, and talking about memes. Our specific area of interest was whether traditional (or non-traditional!) ideas of authorship and plagiarism can apply to memes. After all, when you share a meme with someone, you don't "credit" the person who made it. You may not even know who made it. So, do memes have authors?
We came up with a lot of ideas—far too many for a twenty-minute conference talk. Eventually, we focused on our original question: do memes have authors? The answer was more complicated than you might think. (By the way, if you want to find out what conclusion we came to, you can check out our slides here—our talk is in the "speaker notes.") When you look at a meme and don't get it, or don't like it, or can't tell what side of an argument the meme's poster is on, what do you do? You click on their account and check out their other posts and bio. Although it's not authorship in the sense that a novel has an author, it's still a paratext you incorporate when "reading" a meme.
Finally, the conference came. I spent all of Friday listening to incredible talks from faculty from across the world and across many different disciplines. Saturday had a few more talks, including my own—my group chose me to present. Thank goodness for all those info sessions I've given, right?! Incredibly enough, I gave this presentation in front of one of the scholars I had cited, with him reacting positively to our use his ideas. Throughout the entire conference I had been treated like an actual academic in the field, someone whose ideas were worth discussing, and the peak was giving my presentation alongside people with PhDs and multiple publications in internet studies. Now my group has a new task—make the presentation into a paper, to be published alongside the other papers the conference-goers generated.
At Dartmouth, there is an undergraduate requirement for language; after all, it is the liberal arts! Fulfilling this requirement looks different for various people and I will focus on my experience.
Traditionally, Dartmouth students take three courses during a term, but I decided to take four courses this term! Learn about course load and the academic system at Dartmouth.
As I approach the halfway mark of my Dartmouth journey this spring, I find myself reflecting on the significance of distributive and world culture requirements in shaping my academic experience.
This is my final term before senior year, which is both exciting and terrifying at the same time. One thing I am excited about is the classes I am taking this term, so let me tell you more!
