(As I am using OU Cousins and the CIS Student Advisory Committee as my International Student Groups, I’m using this an international event. This is an Honors Reading Group, so it met once per week for an hour.)

One of the Honors Reading Groups I participated in this semester was “A Peace to End All Peace,” by David Fromkin. This was the second Honors Reading Group that Jaci moderated that I have been in, and it was her final Honors Reading Group to moderate here at OU. While I was sadly unable to attend all the meetings this year, I still greatly enjoyed the group and got a lot out of it. It was an incredibly interesting way of telling the story of WWI and how its treaties created the borders of the present-day Middle East. Though written in 1980, it was still super relevant to current events. We were able to talk about the invasion of Iraq and the rise of ISIS, both of which happened well after this book was written. One of the books main strengths was simply pointing out the incompetence of leaders, which definitely has parallels today. As someone whose major has nothing to do with the Middle East, it was great to be able to learn so much about the region from not only the book, but also Jaci. As one can probably tell from my multiple blog posts about it, I love OU’s Honors Reading Group program and would recommend it to anyone and everyone at OU.

This semester, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to conduct my honors research requirement and write my senior honors thesis as a freshman. I could not be more thankful for Dr. Rebecca Cruise’s guidance and direction while writing this paper. The paper focuses on the history of homosexuality in Russia and popular views of homosexuality there. Additionally, the paper discusses the rise of Vladimir Putin and its effects on views of homosexuality in Russia. One of the most interesting trends I found throughout the semester was that a society’s concepts and ideals of masculinity can often predict how they will treat LGBT+ persons. What a society defines as ideally masculine is meticulously constructed by socio-political institutions, such as the government or the Church. As such, things as simple as a shift in trade routes can affect a society’s views of homosexuality. In the late middle ages, for example, there was a series of Crusades. One major affect of these Crusades was the creation of new trade routes for Western Europe. This shifted trade away from Crimea and Kiev, straining the Kievan economy. Due to this and a number of other factors, Muscovite Princes began becoming more and more powerful, which led to the start of the Muscovy period of Russian history. While the Muscovites were building a city and forging their society, they were not focused on social legislation, and homosexuality was not illegal. This led to a fairly drastic uptick in gay visibility that was recorded by Western European travelers to Moscow. Writing this paper led me to discover many other things like this, and has ultimately improved my knowledge of Russian politics and culture.

In early April, the department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics hosted a series of seminars on the translation of literature, mostly focusing on international poetry. I attended two of the three workshops and learned a ton from these distinguished OU graduates. One of the speakers was an expert on Russian translation, which, as an Eastern European Studies major, I was very interested in. The other was an expert on lusophone poetry in Africa. During the seminars, participants learned much about the process of poetry translation. First, we discussed glosses. While often the translator does both a final translation and the primary gloss, at times they will have a native speaker create a gloss and will then create the final translation. A gloss is essentially a word-for-word translation, which usually doesn’t flow well at all. A literary translator uses the gloss as a base and builds upon it to create something poetic. As long as the final meaning is nearly identical, the translator has quite a bit of freedom. They can try to put meter in or alliteration or whatever they feel matches the quality of the original author’s work. While I do not want to be a literary translator, I am interested in doing some freelance translation in graduate school. So while these seminars were specifically about poetry, they were definitely still interesting and helpful.

(As I am using OU Cousins and the Student Advisory Committee as my International Student Groups, I’m using this an international event. This is an Honors Reading Group, so it met once per week for an hour.)

This semester, I moderated the Honors Reading Group “The Israel Lobby.”  The Honors Reading Groups program describes itself as “Each semester, the Honors College sponsors a program of informal reading groups.  The groups meet just one hour per week, with 10-15 students and one faculty member [or student] from the Honors College, to discuss about 50 pages of reading from specific books. The books cover a very wide range of topics, and most have been recommended by Honors students.”

While the book mostly discussed American interactions with Israel, our group ended up extensively discussing Israeli politics as well. Our discussions ranged from Israeli settlements in Palestine to the effects of the Israel-Palestine conflict on Jordanian politics. I learned most about US economic relations with Israel and the reasons behind them. Multiple opinions were represented, and the reading group proved to be an immensely educational experience.

This semester, for a student group in the College of International Studies that I am a part of, I helped plan and host a screening of the documentary The White Helmets. This film is about a group of volunteers who help save lives and clean up after bombings in Syria. Many have died, but they have saved exponentially more lives than they have lost. All in all it was an incredibly touching documentary. In addition to planning the film screening, I also set up a panel discussion with graduate students whose research interests were relevant to the content of the film. After the film ended, we had a ’round-table’ discussion about the conflicts in Syria. I learned several new things about the Middle East, most notably the role of drought in the Syrian conflicts.