Comparative Study of Death was one of the first classes where I truly fell in love with my major as a newly dubbed freshman. I took the class Summer of 2020, just on the heel of one of the most significant events of modern American history: George Floyd's and Breonna Taylor's murders and the catalyst it served for the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. It showed me how timely, relevant, and needed classes like these are. It also happened to be first 300-level class (which I was simultaneously taking with another 300-level JSIS class, also amazing, called Ethnic Politics and Nationalism with Professor Denis Basic).

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Professor Trembley was an amazing instructor, who put a focus on cultural competency in his class. Each week, we focused on a different aspect of death:

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Week 1: Considering Death

Week 2: Rituals and Spaces of Death

Week 3: Racialized Death

Week 4: Suicide, Care, Protest

Week 5: Impermanence

Week 6: Undead and Haunted Political Economies

Week7: Queer and Gendered Death

Week 8: More-Than-Human Death

Week 9: Life/Death, Non-Life, and Extinction

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Looking back at my writing during this time, I'm sort of embarrassed for how unpolished it is, but I think it reflects that how I've matured over time and how passionate I was (and still am), despite not having yet learned the tools to express myself as eloquently as I want to. I still struggle with that, but here are my papers for all to read. It also encouraged me that while I was struggling in my STEM classes for the first year (which hit very hard on me), I was getting positive feedback in my major and on my writing.

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To the left is my midterm paper about social media use and BLM, more specifically in regards to performative activism

To the right is my final paper analyzing the movie Heathers in relation to the portrayal of teen suicide (mental health romanticization)