Casey O’Brien is a second-year transfer student pursuing a major in Linguistics and a minor in Digital Humanities. Her departmental honors thesis explores how women utilize language within poetry as a tool for self expression. Under the guidance of Dr. Daria Bahtina, her research particularly centers around Confessional poetry and Instagram poetry, examining variations in content, form, and social function. Through a combined application of gender theory, literary and linguistic analysis, and data cleaning, her work aims to understand the ways in which technological and societal evolutions have influenced the way women utilize language when writing about personal themes. Outside of her research, Casey is involved with the leadership team for Aleph, the undergraduate research journal for the arts, humanities, and social sciences at UCLA.