Gender Roles and the War Machine: An Undergraduate Roundtable on Virginia Woolf’s Legacies

Abstract

This roundtable paper will demonstrate that the most central issue in questions of heritage involves changing perception of newborn human life. How does our definition of what comes before us change when the essence of what we are shifts with historical circumstances? In addition, this paper will demonstrate how professors can use research to “professionalize” undergraduates, a proposition that can seem easy in fields like nursing and yet becomes more difficult in English literature and can, at times, turn the broad and complex benefits of the study of literature into a “job training” to become efficient and literate office assistants. However, by engaging our undergraduates early and deeply in research, we professionalize them in a way that does not reduce it to job training. We broaden their horizons and connections, teach them to think deeply and imaginatively, and expose them to the potential of their curiosity. In sum, early exposure to research exponentially expands their abilities, endows them with confidence and allows them to imagine their lives and professions outside narrow frames of geography, age, or class that would limit their professional potential.