Stanford graduate student finds patterns in stories about multiracialism

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2017-06-22 00:55Z by Steven

Stanford graduate student finds patterns in stories about multiracialism

Stanford News
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2017-06-21

Alex Shashkevich


Vanessa Seals (Image credit: Margaret Sena)

English doctoral student Vanessa Seals studies contemporary American novels and memoirs about multiracial people’s experiences to examine the role families play in their search for identity.

Who am I? It’s a question many of us ask at some point in our lives.

Vanessa Seals, a doctoral student in English, is exploring how people of mixed race tackle this question and form their racial identities.

Seals read and analyzed more than 50 contemporary American novels and memoirs, largely written in the past two decades, about the experiences of multiracial people as part of her dissertation research. She found that mixed-race individuals represented in the literature almost always look to their family and relatives when trying to figure out who they are…

Read the entire article here.

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