Meet Maggie Sharp
Maggie Sharp is a much-loved M.A student from Foley, Alabama. Sharp is in her second year of the English graduate program, which means she is busy writing a thesis, teaching freshman composition as a teaching assistant, as well managing the University Writing Center as a Graduate Assistant Director.
Why do you love the UAB English department?
Simply put, it's home. For the past five, almost six, years now, I've been surrounded by like-minded peers, instructors, and colleagues who have understood what it is to not only love words but to be constituted by them every day and in so many different ways. At the level of scholarly development, you couldn't ask for a better faculty, all of whom are thoroughly invested in engaging students in their respective specialties—setting a standard for knowledge acquisition with their pedagogies and challenging students to meet that bar with kindness, intelligence, and respect.
Why has it been a good experience for you?
I think, ever since I was a kid, I've always known that I would find myself with a metaphorical pen in my hand some way or another way down the line. My time in UAB's English Department has solidified that I love the academic grind. There's nothing like the uniquely demanding process of writing a research paper: elbows deep in the trenches of databases and books, notebooks brimming with weeks' worth of annotations, and that sweet, sweet reward at the end: a project that you've carved from the dust of your own making. I've experienced that indescribable rush over and over again at UAB—in individual courses, in writing my undergraduate thesis, and in working on my graduate thesis now.
That high hasn't quite faded yet, which tells me that I must be doing something right.
But I'd be remiss to call this epiphany a solitary process. It's far from that—any writer worth their alphanumeric symbols will tell you as much without blinking. Writing is an inherently collaborative process, and whatever I have done in the English Department, it is replete with the voices of my friends, my professors, and my colleagues. Their encouragement and input alike are invaluable to me, and I'll carry these fingerprints with me long after I've left UAB.
What is the topic of your thesis?
I'm writing on embodied animal voices in Homer's Odyssey, which is to say that focusing on domesticated animals specifically, I'm analyzing how the bodies of these animals become semiotic sites of communication when they undergo physical and symbolic transformations, such as those enacted by killing, consumption, labor, and sacrifice. Domesticated animals are inextricable from the epic's plot, propelling many of its central tensions; I think it'd be pretty darn cool to translate what they have to say.