Academic exploration earns Arts grad top awards

Instead of wandering a leaf-strewn University of Alberta campus, Katie O’Connor, ‘24 BA (hon), began her first semester of university inside her apartment. Thanks to the pandemic, students were limited to online courses. 

This wasn’t ideal, but O’Connor appreciated the distraction that her Arts courses, mainly in the realm of art history, provided. “It gave me a chance to dive into something I was super interested in when everything else was chaotic,” she says. 

When in-person courses resumed a year later, she was eager to make up for lost time. First on the agenda was switching her program. O’Connor had started her degree majoring in History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture, and minoring in English, but after taking English 103 with Valerie Savard, she decided to do a double major within the BA honours program. “I thought it would be really cool to also explore English because there's tons of crossover with different kinds of media, like visual media and textual media,” she says.  

After a year of relative isolation, O’Connor was eager to finally meet her classmates and professors in person. She began volunteering for campus organizations like the English Film Studies Undergraduate Network (EFSUN) and the Student Library Advisory Committee (SLAC), as well as off-campus organizations like the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts. O’Connor also began writing for the student newspaper, the Gateway, ultimately serving as both Deputy Arts & Culture Editor and Managing Editor.

“My mindset really changed once I got to talk to people in Edmonton and my school community,” she says. She remained a conscientious and high-performing student, prioritizing her university experience, both in terms of community engagement and academic exploration.

To that end, O’Connor let her passion for learning guide her experience. Supervised by Drs. Eddy Kent and Natalie Loveless, her honours’ thesis explored monstrosity within the work of Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. Titled,“Leaving a mark: Sutured bodies in Wangechi Mutu’s Monstrous Collage,” her hybrid thesis combined art history and English literature research with fiction writing.

Some of O’Connor’s academic achievements fell beyond the scope of her degree program. In 2022, she earned the Roger Smith Undergraduate Researcher Award for an independent research project comparing gender and monstrosity within a short story by Angela Carter and photographs by Cindy Sherman. She later presented her research at academic conferences. 

With fellow English honours student Olivia O’Neill, O’Connor also created a research project about The Great Gatsby and its book cover designs. The duo received funding from the Department of English and Film Studies to visit the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers literary archive at Princeton University, which houses a large collection of original manuscripts and other documents. Currently, O’Connor and O’Neill are creating a podcast series about what they discovered.

This fall, O’Connor will head to New York City to begin the Columbia University MFA Writing Program. Although the MFA will be a significant departure from her undergraduate academic work, O’Connor was inspired by the creative writing courses she took during her undergraduate and the mentorship of Conor Kerr and Jordan Abel. “An MFA is a lot more practice-focused,” she says. “I’m interested in working on story crafting after studying books and literature for so long.” 

This won’t be the first time O’Connor has lived abroad. During her undergraduate, she spent half a semester living in Tuscany via the U of A’s School of Cortona, as well as a summer in Berlin for an art gallery internship. With only a three-week German language course, O’Connor was far from fluent and communication was often tricky. “I met a lot of great people who were super patient with my lack of German language skills,” she says.

But before she embarks on a new academic adventure, O’Connor will cross the stage at the U of A’s June convocation. With a GPA of 4.0 and an impressive portfolio of achievements, she will receive her degree along with the prestigious Governor General’s Silver Medal (which is given to the top three students graduating from almost all of the university’s faculties), the Dr. John MacDonald Medal in Arts (given to the top Honors program graduate), and the Rutherford Memorial Medal in English (given to the top student in English). 

 As honoured as she is to receive these accolades, O’Connor is proudest of her decision to let her love of learning shape her university experience. “I was passionate about all of my classes,” she says. “It was super hard, but it was work I really enjoyed and believed in.”