Sophie Yates awarded 2021 Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award

Congratulations to Sophie Yates, UNC Charlotte’s recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award for the Category of Humanities and Fine Arts. Sophie’s thesis, “Queer Desire and Narrative Fiction in the Works of Coleette, Renée Vivien, and Natalie Barney,” is a stunning work of scholarship that explores how these significant writers drew on their experiences and identities as queer women were articulated to the general reading public. Their write, Sophie argues, skifully required the reader “to encounter the narrative itself without being able to assign an identity or pathology to the experience being recorded. Moreover, as women whose literary works and lives transcended boundaries between English and French literature, Vivien, Colette, and Barney represent a fluidity of culture between Britain and France that is too often dismissed in the dividing-up of the respective canons.” Sophie’s research for her thesis was profound and the the resulting work, which can stand among the very best studies of these authors, is both fascinating and compelling. Yates, who was nominated In 2019 Yates as an Outstanding TA of the Year, has published work on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Sophie is now pursuing her doctorate at the University of British Columbia.