Student Evaluation:

Arlen Austin
PhD Candidate
Department of Modern Culture and Media
Brown University
arlen_austin@brown.edu
(646) 617 0668

Gabriella Lundy was a truly remarkable participant in my 2019 summer@brown course

“Literature, Culture, and American Identities.” She is the sort of student one always hopes to have in
the classroom: one who diligently engages in the texts, listens carefully to lectures and her colleagues
and is always prepared with valuable contributions of her own. Her classroom participation was
stellar; one of the students I could most count on to be ready with a thoughtful comment. She brought
a great deal of cross-cultural understanding to our conversations from her experience as a Columbian-
American and was particularly brilliant in engaging texts addressed to the issues of borders and cross-
cultural hybridity. Her engagement with the course always helped me to plan lessons and
Gabriella’s written work for the course was similarly quite impressive. In the daily written
responses to texts, posted through our course’s online platform, she was always one of the first to
contribute and among the most thorough and thoughtful in her analysis. These daily responses of
Gabriella’s were particularly impressive as we were grappling with texts of great complexity, many of
which I have taught in the past to accomplished undergraduates at Brown. Gabriella demonstrated that
she had read all the texts thoroughly, was constantly making connections to current events and always
eager to inform the conversation based on her knowledge and personal experience. Gabriella was
particularly crucial to the class discussion when we read selections from Gloria Anzaldúa’s work
Borderlands: La Frontera. This is all the more impressive as the text is a complex combination of
memoir, poetry and cultural critique which even undergraduates, in my experience, struggle to make
sense of. Undaunted, Gabriella carefully explained some of the more difficult passages of Spanish
poetry to the class and had excellent comments on Anzaldúa’s conception of linguistic violence.
Gabriella’s final written assignment for the class demonstrated a skillful integration of some
of the most complex texts we had read in the class (including Baldwin and Anzaldúa) brought to an
analysis of her own research into the politics of the musical Rent by Jonathan Larson. The text
demonstrated both excellent reading of the texts from class as well as thorough independent research
skills. I was particularly struck by her writing skills, as she was one of the most effective in the class
in relating the texts we read and discussed with material from popular culture. The quality of her
writing was consistent with many of the more advanced students I have taught at an undergraduate
level.
Having taught undergraduate courses at Columbia and Brown Universities, I can say with
confidence that Gabriella is already performing at the highest levels of undergraduate scholarly
engagement. Gabriella has my highest recommendation as an applicant to any undergraduate program.
I can say with confidence that she would be a great asset in particular to any humanities department at
the undergraduate level as her current interests are most keen in literature, history and philosophy.
Doubtless however, she will succeed in whatever course of study she choses to pursue. Please do not
hesitate to contact me if I can further support Gabriella in the admissions process.

Sincerely,
Arlen Austin