A ’25 from Brookline, Massachusetts, Sophie studied English and neuroscience at Dartmouth and is interested in how literary and cognitive fields approach understanding thought, perception, language, memory, and development across species.
Special Collections played an integral role in her undergraduate experience: revisiting her favorite childhood stories in a ‘Victorian Children’s Literature’ course through the richly illustrated first editions at Rauner reignited a curiosity that evolved into extensive research with the archive’s holding of Rudyard Kipling’s short story collection Wee Willie Winkie: and Other Child Stories and culminated in a senior honors thesis titled, Forty Winks Later: The Dream of the Nation in the Children’s and Adult Literature of Kipling and Rushdie.
As an undergraduate assistant at Rauner during her senior year, she paged materials for classes on a range of topics she wouldn't have explored in her own coursework, from medieval bestiaries to 1920s foxtrot scores.
An aspiring educator, Sophie strives to create a learning environment that sparks students’ curiosity so they are also excited to return to Rauner Library and investigate the collections further. She is focused on creating innovative pairings of materials and active learning activities that supplement students’ analytical toolkits, making the subject(s) they study more tangible by foregrounding the essential relationships between form, content, and audience.
Sophie has designed and facilitated classes for ‘Romantic Era Literature and Frankenstein,’ ‘The Rise of the Novel,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘U.S. and the World from Independence to 1865,’ and constructed sessions for visiting groups on WWI French-American correspondence and Robert Frost poetry.
Building off her passions for children’s literature and genre theory, Sophie is currently processing a previously un-cataloged collection of artworks by Victorian children’s and adult illustrators, including H.M. Brock and Hugh Thompson. She is also curating an exhibit on Transportive Literatures, which will explore escapist genres and portable literary forms to consider the impact of when and where we read on our engagement with narrative.
