
UA Alumni: Shelly Harder
Shelly was the Overall Winner in the Literature Category in 2015.
Where do your interests lie?
My favourite place to be is surrounded by stacks of books or rambling across fields under wide skies. My research interests are Romantic and modernist literatures and my work lies along intersections of literary scholarship, philosophy and intellectual history, and creative practice.
What are you doing now and what has happened since the award?
I’m doing a DPhil in English literature at the University of Oxford where I’m researching connections between the work of William Blake and James Joyce.
In 2017 I completed an M.A. in Creative Process at the National University of Ireland (Uversity), where I undertook a course of study that spanned literature, philosophy, and a creative writing thesis, zero dawn, which I’ve since revised and is forthcoming with above/ground press in 2021.
I’ve written two poetry chapbooks, remnants (Baseline Press 2018) and intimology (Frog Hollow Press 2020), worked on the editorial team for Poets Versus Sexual Harassment: An Anthology (2020), and had creative work appear in print and online in Canada, Ireland, and the UK.

Have you done something fun?
I managed a whiskey shop during gap years between degrees. Duties included writing tasting notes and choosing whiskey pairings for events.
Has receiving an award for your hard work helped?
Receiving an Undergraduate Award gave a confidence boost, not only as validation of my work, but more importantly through the unique opportunity to meet such a large and brilliant cohort of peers and to enter into conversation with them.
Publication of my essay in The Undergraduate Journal provided a helpful C.V. entry, and the paper was then published on my undergraduate institution’s online library of scholarship, from which I still receive occasional updates on downloads.
This satisfying sense of reaching a broader academic audience provides good motivation to pursue further publication of research.
Why should students submit their work to the UA Programme?
Undergraduate students devote great quantities of time and effort to produce quality coursework; taking that research seriously and integrating it into a broader trajectory of professional activity is crucial to success.
Submission to the Undergraduate Awards provides a wonderful opportunity to evaluate the significance of your work and its position in the world, to place it before an audience, and to become acquainted with the extraordinary work being done by your peers.
Learn more about Shelly's work on their website.