Hello! My name is Kellan Kissinger and I am a second-year majoring in English (Editing, Writing, and Media) and minoring in Philosophy and Law. Although I’m a second-year, I graduate in Fall 2025 and knew coming into FSU that I wanted to experiment with research before I graduated to see if it was something that appealed to me. That goal brought me to apply to the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program in which I have been working with my amazing mentor, Audrey Jacobs, a ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art Education, for the past academic year. Through Audrey’s mentorship, I learned about undergraduate research through a project focusing on museum education, specifically concerning how an individual museum schoolteacher strives to bring museums into the teaching process. This project has shown me just how much I enjoy research. I love puzzling out phenomena and uncovering the patterns hidden beneath the surface of my initial understanding.
My next step in my undergraduate research journey is my Honors in the Major thesis, “Tracing Female Utopianism and Dystopianism in Medieval and Contemporary Literature.” This project aims to explore the intersections between Christine de Pizan’s medieval A Book of the City of Ladies and contemporary feminist literature, particularly focusing on themes of female utopianism, dystopianism, and gender roles. De Pizan’s work, written in the early 14th century, constructs an allegorical city where notable historical and mythological women build a symbolic refuge, ultimately challenging the prevalent misogyny and inequality of de Pizan’s time that I believe has echoed into our future. While de Pizan’s work will serve as the foundational text for this project, two other texts will also be considered to trace the evolution of female utopianism and dystopianism through history: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Sherri S. Tepper’s dystopian novel The Gate to Women’s Country.
I will root my argument and analysis primarily in textual analysis of the various texts, focusing on key themes like the root and construction of female utopias and dystopias and critiques of a gendered society. I will also conduct thematic and rhetorical comparisons by contrasting and comparing de Pizan’s work with more modern feminist texts. Finally, I will also contextualize these texts within their historical, cultural, and political climates so that I can gain a full understanding of how these texts respond to their respective time periods.
The relevance and significance of this topic lies in how important it is to examine how utopian and dystopian literature reflects and critiques current and historical injustices faced by women. If we can understand the history of these challenges, we can better understand contemporary systemic inequalities. I believe that this understanding should also come from the source: women’s voices, hence how my project will focus solely on female authors’ contributions to this broad genre of female utopianism and dystopianism. Analysis of these texts can also highlight the roles women are often forced to play by society and how women can work to resist, subvert, and redefine these roles for the betterment of their gender and society as a whole.
Special thanks to my faculty director, Dr. Molly Hand, a professor with the English department that focuses on early modern English literature, gender studies, ecocriticism, and animal studies, and the other members of my supervisory committee, Dr. Celia Caputi, an English professor with expertise in Shakespeare/early modern studies, feminist critical theory, cultural studies, Virginia Woolf, and Italian studies, and Dr. Azat Gündoğan, a professor in the University Honors program that explores utopianism, social and global inequalities, everyday life, global urbanization, and cinematic representations of urban spaces.
I can’t wait to bring you all along for the journey as I dig deeper into this topic!
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