Spotlight: Karen Laird

Karen Laird
PhD Candidate, English

Receiving awards for your hard work is always gratifying, especially if it is coming from your peers. Karen Laird received the Superior Graduate Student Award this year for her outstanding work as an English student working towards her Ph.D. “I’m honored for this award knowing that my peers appreciate and recognize me and my work,” Karen says.

Karen’s studies focus on Victorian literature and culture along with theatre and film adaptation. It may seem more common for English majors to switch to a different major while in school, but it was the opposite for Karen. “I was actually pre-med and taking English courses for fun,” Karen says. One course in particular was a Victorian novel course, which she fell in love with and decided English was where her passion lied.

The length of the novels, coming in around 800 pages, is something that appealed to Karen.

“You are able to get lost in what you’re reading,” she says. “I’m fascinated with the history of that time period and the way the novel was hugely popular in that time. It was a national event.”

Karen explains how The Woman in White was published. People would wait for magazine day on the first of the month when they would release a couple chapters from the story. “Fiction was really important to people,” she says.

Karen was recommended to come to MU while finishing up her undergraduate program at Loyola University in Maryland. “[MU’s] English department has a great reputation nationally. It’s great for students interested in studying both literature and creative writing,” she says. Karen hopes creative writing will help her research writing be more lively and not as stagnant as research can tend to become.

While working towards her Ph.D., Karen has been able to teach an array of courses, including one she designed titled The Brontës. Her students study the family and even indulge in reading the biography of Charlotte Brontë. “The students become experts on the family,” Karen says. She is also designing an online course to be available in the near future. Karen thoroughly enjoys teaching and hopes to continue after the completion of her Ph.D.

(Story and photo by Samantha Abbott)