Ella is a fourth-year English major and Geography minor from the Bay Area who is interested in studying the intersection of literature, history, and landscape. She is currently completing a Departmental Honors Thesis in the English Department which seeks to understand the roles of genre and geography in the construction of systems of power, namely race and gender, in two contemporary works of Western fiction, How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang and The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. Through a comparative analysis of Zhang’s and Lin’s works, she hopes to gain a better understanding of the way that literature interacts with history and its consequences, and how fiction can operate as a counterbalance to harmful normative narratives of the past. Ella is excited to continue conducting research after UCLA in graduate school and beyond.
