As I write this, there are many reasons to be excited about life. It is a balmy 80 degrees in Tappan Square (FINALLY sandal season), Jesse Montgomery is performing here next week, and we’re looking forward to hosting the last All Roads day (yay!); but most importantly for me (and you, dear reader of this particular blog), tomorrow is the Undergraduate Research Symposium where I will be presenting on my winter term project. One of my favorite things about my departments (Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies; Musical Studies) and Oberlin at large is how you’re encouraged to find your lane.
For me, this story is twofold — one for each department. My first semester here I took Intro to Queer Studies and fell in love with the world of queer theory. Conceptualizing gender and interpersonal relationships in such novel ways (to me, anyways) was thrilling, and I was completely hooked. Towards the end of October, when we started thinking about our winter term projects, I decided that I’d like to look more into queer representation and theory in the video game world — see previous blog on this subject for more details, but it was an eye-opening January for me in which I applied critical lenses to games at large. I took a few more GSFS classes — Gender in Early Modern Europe; Queering Media, etc. — and the next fall, when I took my Feminist Research Methodologies course, I knew that I had loved the project but wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep going in the field of game studies. I was already teaching a course on video game music (more on this later), and wanted to try branching out into different areas of study — like cinema, or literature. My friends and professors were extremely helpful in talking through this exploratory period, suggesting critical texts — Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema — or new pieces of media — Agatha All Along, for example — to parse through and figure out a path forwards. Ultimately, I found both cinema and literature to be too overwhelming a field, with too many prerequisites to operate within for me to feel confident speaking. Once again, I returned to video games and decided to take my experiences critiquing Agatha into the ludic world. Thus, my winter term project on game witch representation was born, and several months later I have 40-odd pages of research that I’ll be sharing to people tomorrow! It’s a bit surreal, honestly — it was a lot of work, but it didn’t feel like it in the slightest, thanks to my interest in the subject matter as guided by the wonderful people here.
My other department of Musical Studies follows a somewhat similar trajectory — my first semester here, I decided to take Music History 101 for fun alongside Music of the 1970s. I loved both classes, and decided to take more courses on the subject — Music of the Romantic Era, Ethnomusicology, etc. — but it wasn’t until this fall that I really found my niche. Between teaching my exco on video game music (LudomusicologyCo) and taking a course on Classical Music Post-1950, I discovered that I love more modern takes on older forms. Of course, this is not to discount pop music (which I also love listening to), but it was delightful to again receive such amazing support to find a field in which I was and am excited to be in. Currently, I’m working on a Queering Music class syllabus to bring both sides of my interests together, and I’m highly excited to see where that ends up going. For me, Oberlin is amazing because it at once supports exploration of many different, disparate topics and also encourages going super in-depth on a specific subject. I’ve loved my time here so far, and I’m excited to present on a small aspect of it tomorrow!
