Running with Virginia Woolf

“English combines good stories with everything that’s important to the person who’s telling them,” says Stasia Honnold, an English major from Sacramento, California. Stasia is focusing on one of her favorite storytellers--Virginia Woolf--in her senior honors thesis. As she explores the influence of Woolf’s past on her identity, Stasia reflects on the events that have shaped her own identity while at Lewis & Clark.

It was a literature-based class that steered her toward a major in English. In her English classes, she has discovered a passion for modernism and for Woolf, “the quintessential modernist feminist author.” Last year, Stasia won a $2,000 Dixon Award through the English department, which she used to attend the International Virginia Woolf Conference in London.

Outside of the English department, a semester in Senegal has been the highlight of her time in college. “It’s impossible to have an experience like that without it affecting how you view the world,” she says. “It’s the kind of experience that contributes to the narrative of who you are as a person.”

In the next chapter of Stasia’s narrative, she hopes to attend a top graduate program. After that, her goal is simple: “I hope to teach somewhere like Lewis & Clark.”