Through Oberlin College’s English department, students may elect to pursue an Honors project, proposing a topic and dedicating the school year (or longer) to its study. The project is independent in nature, allowing the student to focus on personal scholarly interest.

For my Honors project, I turned to my first love—opera—and studied composer Matthew Aucoin and playwright Sarah Ruhl’s recent opera Eurydice. Just as the operatic genre marries music with words, Orpheus marries Eurydice, and things turn hellish from there.

Combining literary and musical modes of analysis, I brought my Oberlin experience to a close, studying personally relevant tensions between music and words that appear in both Eurydice and the operatic genre.

Most valuably, the thesis brought me closer to those around me; I chatted with my brilliant classmates and generous professors about what it means to be an artist and the Orphic sacrifices it entails. I spent countless and precious hours with my thesis advisor Jennifer Bryan and had the chance to Zoom with composer Matthew Aucoin—thank you to them both!