Hi everyone! My name is Anna and I am a second-year student hoping to major in Sociology and minor in French. I grew up in Ottawa and went to high school in England and my family now live in Denmark, where I just returned from after spending Christmas at home.

I never really enjoyed studying literature in high school, it was definitely one of my least favorite subjects. However, in my first year at UBC, I took a French Literature course, and last term, I took SPAN 312, a course on Latin American Literature, and in both classes, I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed learning about French / Latin American history and culture through literature and I was surprised to actually enjoy the abstractness of engaging in critical analysis of the works. Since I enjoyed both of these courses so much I thought that Romance Studies would be a good course to continue learning about the broader romance languages and cultures and to learn more about key historical events through literature. As a french minor, I may be slightly biased in being most excited to read the french novels, but I am definitely also excited to read about the romantic languages and cultures that I don’t have any experience in learning about yet.

The introductory lecture highlighted the Romance World as unbordered and unmarked, which makes me curious to see how we begin to analyse the texts as pieces of an unstructured discipline. As a Sociology major, my favourite part about studying literature is attempting to understand the literary choices and stories as potential critiques of society from the author, specifically issues such as colonialism and oppression, so I look forward to uncovering some of the patterns of themes and critiques that we uncover together as we move through the course!