Dr. Jennifer Gower-Toms
134 O’Dowd Hall
Department of English
2200 North Squirrel Road
Rochester, Michigan
48309-4401
gowertoms@oakland.edu
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing in support of Sarah Jackson as the recipient of the Kyes/Dressler Scholarship. Sarah
was a student in my English 241 “Survey of British Literature” class in the Fall of 2013. Over
the course of the semester, I was consistently impressed with Sarah’s dedication to the course
and to learning more generally. Both her participation in class discussion and her written work
demonstrated Sarah’s insightful analysis of the literary text and her detailed attention to literary
technique and form. She is a talented and thoughtful student and reader of literature. Sarah’s
classroom performance—her clarity of thought and her deep understanding of literary
concepts—also indicate that Sarah will be a very successful teacher in her own classroom.
One of the major emphases in my course was the examination of the literary text as a cultural
artifact. Among the challenges posed to the students was the ability to combine literary analysis,
an understanding of the literary movement from which the text emerged and the cultural and
historical landscape that went into the production of the work. Sarah excelled at each of these
skills, constructing papers that incorporated all of the above information into a concise, elegantly
articulated and well organized composition. In addition to meeting—and surpassing—these
rigorous standards, Sarah also took on particularly complex and difficult works, such as Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando. In her final paper on Woolf’s intricate and sometimes confounding text, Sarah
was able to incorporate into a single sophisticated composition such topics as modernism’s
challenge to biography as a genre, Woolf’s differentiation between gender and sex and changing
notions of womanhood, particularly following the Victorian period. Despite the complexity of
each of these topics, Sarah was able to both precisely describe these literary and cultural
phenomena and succinctly connect them to Woolf’s work while incorporating refined and
discerning close-readings of the text.
Sarah Jackson is an asset to our program and among the most talent students I have encountered
in my courses. She is a diligent and talented student whose devotion to her own learning is
apparent both in her classroom performance as well as her written work. I highly recommend
Sarah for this scholarship.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at the above address.
Sincerely,
Jennifer A. Gower-Toms