Mursal Sidiqi is an English major and Comparative Literature minor completing an English departmental honors thesis. Her thesis explores the trope of the Oriental woman that is applied to South Asian and North African women in literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The thesis traces the development of the trope from its conception by male, British travel writers to its reconfiguration by British women to promote Western proto-feminist ideas. Her research puts into conversation Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s travel writing in the Turkish Embassy Letters and Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya to explore the manner in which genre and the development of British feminism impacted the formation of the British proto-feminist Oriental woman. Mursal’s interest in her research topic is informed by her observations of Southwest Asian and North African women’s representations in modern media and the histories that shaped those perceptions during the rise of the British Empire, when the dichotomies of the West and the East became especially prevalent in Britain. After graduation, Mursal hopes to continue her studies in literatures and scholarship on questions of gender and sexuality and orientalism through the pursuit of a doctoral degree.