Last summer I studied abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland. Over the course of four weeks, my classmates and I aired a live weekly broadcast. We also gathered footage and conducted interviews with locals for our documentaries. I chose to study the Highland Clearances, and learned a lot about Scottish history in the process.

My Documentary, The Highlands – An Artifical Landscape

In Spring 2026, I worked on a digital project in collaboration with the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center. My group partnered with the center to help advertise their resources to the community. We assisted the CRHC in expanding their outreach by creating an Omeka site to highlight photographs and documents that the public can engage with, as well as Instagram and YouTube accounts to connect with younger community members. I created a subdomain for the project, which highlighted my progress and findings throughout the semester.

In Spring 2026, I investigated the linguistic speech patterns of queer students at UMW through conducted semi-structured interviews. Upon transcribing the interviews, I researched language ideologies related to gender and sexuality and metalinguistic awareness within the community.

In the class Intro to Public History, I worked with a group of my classmates to develop an exhibit focusing on the student population of Mary Washington from 1958-63. We made use of primary sources from the University Special Collections and Archives, creating interpretative text to help show what drew students to this campus. We developed multiple ways for visitors to engage with us including a current day map of students’ hometowns, a primary source matching game, and a make your own advertisement for UMW coloring sheet.

In the Fall of 2025, I worked on a group project for my class, History of American Technology. My partner and I chose to focus on the American Banjo and created a website to showcase how it was invented and its impact on American culture. Our documentary, which is featured on the website, provides a complete overview of our research.

I wrote an article on retired menu items from Panera Bread for my Magazine Journalism class, and it was promoted on Buzzfeed.

I wrote a paper in my Language and Gender class on the Disney film Frozen, using recordings I gathered to explore how the lead women spoke. I analyzed their speech patterns in relation to gender norms, presenting my key findings in the paper.

In Spring 2025 for Sociological and Anthropological Linguistics, my group surveyed our classmates, friends, and relatives from the United States in order to see the variation between Northern and Southern accents. We asked participants about lexical variation and word pronunciation before prompting them to identify their accent and share experiences based around their accent. My group presented our findings, tying in readings we had previously discussed in class.

In 2025, I presented at the UMW Communications and Digital Studies Symposium as a part of the Interactive Media Showcase. I created my piece, Portals, on Twine for the Electronic Literature class I took the previous semester. The story focuses on the grief process, and how it is woven into our memories.