Jennifer Blevins, pursuing both an MFA and a Ph.D. in our program, receives award as an outstanding graduate student
The Office of the Vice President for Research's Breakthrough Graduate Scholar Award recognizes exceptional graduate students who demonstrate excellence in the classroom, and make considerable contributions to research and scholarly activities in their field. Approximately one dozen exceptional graduate students are honored with this award each spring.
Jennifer is pursuing both an MFA (in creative nonfiction) and a Ph.D. (in twentieth-century American literature) in the English Department's graduate program. She is one of Debra Rae Cohen's managing editors for the prestigious journal Modernism/modernity.
Jennifer's writing, both creative and scholarly, resides at the intersection between academia and popular culture. She is the first student at USC to simultaneously undertake an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Literature. In both her creative and scholarly work, she investigates the ways in which bodies, particularly fat bodies, are portrayed, discussed, and marginalized and how bodies, fat hatred, and shame intersect with familial relationships. She has been invited to present her work at three national conferences and three regional conferences. Jennifer's MFA creative non-fiction writing interweaves personal memoir with research and cultural analysis; her PhD research focuses primarily on twentieth-century American literature with an emphasis on women writers and modernism.