EmcÒ×±¶ÌåÓý

Succeeding in the Classroom

When Emma Bare ’25 submitted her essay for LITR 211: Critical Methods of Literary Study, she couldn’t have realized that nearly six months later, she’d receive word that would be published in an international journal.  

However, thanks to her hard work and support from Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, that is exactly what happened.

Emma, an English literature major from Camas, Washington, won the from the Sigma Tau Delta international English honor society. As winner, she won a monetary prize, and her essay will be published in the 2025 edition of the  Sigma Tau Delta Review.

 “I'd sit down to work for like an hour, and then an hour would stretch into two,” Bare said. “And I took a lot of time over Jan Term to kind of go over it, and then spring break, I was kind of going over it again.”

Emma, who was shy when she first came to EmcÒ×±¶ÌåÓý, came out of her shell. Reshmi noticed Emma’s potential in classes during Emma’s first year at EmcÒ×±¶ÌåÓý. 

“I realized very early on with Emma, that when she said things, they were very thought through and very meaningful,” Reshmi said.  “I began to notice, as a faculty member, it’s not always the student who's saying the most, but sometimes the one who really makes those meaningful contributions.”

During Emma’s sophomore year, she took LITR 354: Race, Imperialism, Justice with Reshmi. The course explores post-colonial literature and theory.  Little did Emma know that this is where her award-winning paper was born.

A Lasting Relationship

A year later, in the critical methods class, Reshmi assigned the class a project where students had to revise a past paper and apply a critical lens to it. Emma chose a paper she was proud of from LITR 354. The essay, titled, “Interrogating Torture and Surveillance in J.M. Coetzee's ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ in a Post-9/11 Space," took a critical look at the torture parallels between the book “Waiting for the Barbarians” and 9/11. She applied a post-structuralist lens to look at how torture and surveillance were portrayed in the novel.

“When I turned in the paper, Reshmi was like, ‘You should consider submitting this to the Review.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, whatever.’ Not thinking much of it, but I was like, I'll do it because I have a terrible time saying no to people,” Emma said laughing.

Within the next few months, magic happened. Working together closely, Reshmi and Emma got the essay submission ready. Reshmi helped brainstorm ideas with Emma that, she said, ultimately changed her paper into a finished, polished essay.

“She was like, ‘They don't want a standard class paper. They want something new,’” Emma said. “’They want you to talk about the book in the context of the real world.’”

So that’s exactly what Emma and Reshmi worked on. The process of editing the paper was very organized, and the faculty-student relationship evolved. 

“From my point of view, it was like, what would I do if it was a colleague,” Reshmi said. “You do that with the smartest students because it is no longer that the student is only a student. They are on the same level.”

Finally, after many revisions to her original paper, Emma submitted the essay to the journal in April 2024. 

“There i