
About the prize
The UBC Undergraduate Prize in Library Research is a way to showcase students’ effective and innovative use of library services, information experts and resources provided by the UBC Library. Applications for these prizes also provide students with an opportunity to reflect on their information-seeking experience, showcase their research beyond the classroom, and promote scholarship excellence at the undergraduate level at the University of British Columbia.
The Prize was established by UBC Library to encourage more and deeper use of its resources and collections, to advance information literacy at UBC, and to promote academic excellence at UBC.
Q: Could you tell us a little bit about your project?
Written for my English honours seminar on World War I literature, my paper reads Mary Borden’s fictionalized memoir, The Forbidden Zone (1929), as an unlikely addition to the Weird tradition, a genre of horror flourishing during the early twentieth century. A nurse writing behind the Belgian frontlines, Borden’s text offers a perspective of World War I shaped by her care of fragmented bodies and an endless tide of the dying. Because the project is so closely tied to historical events, extensive research was key to the writing process.
Q: What does winning this prize mean to you?
“Scholarships like this one, which recognize that research is something undergraduates can perform, are incredibly validating.”
I’m planning on pursuing an academic career, and so professionalization is something I’m thinking about a lot. Scholarships like this one, which recognize that research is something undergraduates can perform, are incredibly validating.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
After I finish my degree in English literature, I hope to attend graduate school and then eventually teach and research in the field. My research interests include Weird fiction and depictions of feminine monstrosity and disability in ecogothic literature.
Q: Do you have a favourite research spot at UBC Library?
“The immediacy of the actual physical books and the old archival publications is inspiring and helpful.”
This may seem like an odd answer, but I like Koerner’s florescent-lit first floor, down with the stacks. The immediacy of the actual physical books and the old archival publications is inspiring and helpful. I understand the need for storage solutions, but browsing physical collections is a genuinely valuable part of research.