Washington, D.C. native Jess Libow’s encounter with the English major at Haverford demonstrates the combination of intellectual breadth and rigorous methodological foundation that the discipline offers.  Attracted to Haverford’s Honor Code, Jess originally came to Haverford looking to explore the issue of disability, and initially thought that her interest would mean pursuing psychology or education.  However, in her first year Writing Seminar “Portraits of Disability and Difference” with Professor Kristin Lindgren, Jess “realized that a lot of the questions I was interested in asking about disability ultimately came down to issues of language and representation.  Once I began exploring English, I found that the material I was encountering in my courses resonated with me on multiple levels.”

This past summer, Jess’s work as an Editorial Intern at the Bellevue Literary Review in New York City gave her another perspective on English and writing as a way of exploring her interest in representations of the body.  Housed at Bellevue Hospital, and published by the NYU Langone Medical Center’s Division of Medical Humanities, the journal is “dedicated to publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that engage with themes of the human body,” Jess notes.  The works therein thus “make literal the points of contact” between our bodies and how they are portrayed in various genres.

Jess’s thesis examines issues of disability and assistive devices through the prism of the writings of author Flannery O’Connor.  An essay that situates O’Connor’s work alongside post-World War II responses to disabled Americans, Jess’s scholarship invites us to consider literary representations within a specific historical and theoretical context of disability.  One of the reasons that Jess chose this thesis project was because she “saw it as an opportunity to blend my critical interest in disability studies with the methodologies of my English major.”

In addition to her focused work in English, Jess is a Senior Interviewer in the Admissions Office, and has been a student representative on Haverford’s Educational Policy Committee since Freshman year.   She also studies American Sign Language at the University of Pennsylvania and started the ASL Club here at Haverford.  Next fall Jess will pursue her Ph.D. in English at Emory University in Atlanta.