ABOUT

JOCELYN SEARS

I am a rising third-year doctoral student in the Department of English at Harvard University and the recipient of an AM degree from the department, where I am co-coordinator of the Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature Colloquium. I am also a 2020-2021 Canada Dissertation Research Fellow

at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, receiving support for my work on Margaret Atwood.

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My research focuses on narrative voice in 20th- and 21st-century novels, with particular attention to the formal choices that authors make in depicting minds that have experienced trauma. My wider academic interests include narratology, book history, feminist studies, queer studies, literary modernism, contemporary poetry, and speculative and dystopian fiction.

Before coming to Harvard, I received my BA from Stanford University, graduating with honors in English and a minor in Feminist and Queer Studies, and I completed an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Virginia, where I held a Poe-Faulkner Fellowship. I spent two years as a staff researcher for the magazine mental_floss, and have worked as a copywriter for online-shopping platforms and as

a podcast researcher for How Stuff Works and iHeartMedia.

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I have published cultural and historical articles in venues including mental_floss, JSTOR Daily, 

Atlas Obscura, and Racked, and my poetry has appeared in PANK, Apogee, BOAAT,

Southern Indiana Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, and other journals.