I have spent a lot of time exploring my academic interests. I have had many attempts to get off the ground, the first of which was music. However, due to many circumstances, music did not work out. After much soul searching, I ended up at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania(IUP) studying Secondary English Education. This was the degree that I completed as my undergraduate degree.
However, something didn't feel quite right. I loved teaching, and I loved English, but there was something about the secondary level that didn't work for me. With that in mind, I chose to stay at IUP and continue working on my position in the field of English. At this point in my life, I didn't know what specifically I wanted to study. I had a lot of different ideas and a lot of different interests, but could not quite make sense of these ideas in a way that made sense to me. To help me determine my goals, I began the Master's program at IUP in Composition and Literature. During this program, I took time to reflect on my academic career as far as I could remember to determine what I might want to do.
It wasn't until I took a class with Dr. Tanya Heflin, a class that explored magical realism, that I began to realize that some of my long-standing interests - such as folktales and fairytales - could be taken seriously as a field of study. It was this realization, and the fact that I had recently been reading Rick Riordan's award winning series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, that I made my decision to study Mythology and Folktales as my field of scholarly study.
Image taken by Alexander Hagood
I now continue my education at IUP, pursuing my PhD in Literature and Criticism, focusing on Mythology and Folklore as literature. My other scholarly interests include adaptation theory, young adult literature, and late American literature. I hope to teach literature at the post-secondary level.
