Reflection 2/16

After my conference today, I've decided to look into revolving my upcoming paper on the history of Bryn Mawr College's diversity, the development from consiting of mostly wealthy white women to a much more diverse community, and the diversification of the English Department's curriculum, and what it now means to be an English Major at Bryn Mawr College. I started thinking about what it means to be an English Major today, and realized that it has changed a lot throughout the last hundred years or so. Initially, and up until probably the last thirty, forty, maybe fifty years or so, studying English literature meant names like Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hemingway, etc., and wasn't very political. Now, however, literature includes a lot of non-white, non-male voices, and has become much more politicized. My plan for approaching this is to go through Bryn Mawr's archives to look at statistics of the college's diversity throughout the years, and then look at a history of the English curriculum. Then, depending on the statistical changes and whether they corrolate with the changes and diversification in the English curriculum here, I'd like to focus on a more specific length of time, for example the last ten , fifteen, thirty, or fifty years. I think it would be really interesting to see how the diversification of Bryn Mawr College has influenced the values and principles of teaching here, and what that means as a whole as a reflection of the general identity of the college.