ASU Doctoral Student wins Best Graduate Student Paper Award

Our cultural obsession with body size and image can be traced back as far as the seventeenth-century, says doctoral candidate Angela O'Neal. She specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth century British Literature, but her work combines cultural, historical, and literary analysis to examine the factors that have led to the concept of the super-slender, "anorexic" body as a marker of beauty, sexuality, and celebrity.

She was awarded the Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Romanticism, held at ASU in November, 2006. The paper "Form and Phantasm: The Poetry of Blake's Eternal(ly) Slender Bodies," was adapted from one of her dissertation chapters and will also be published in a conference volume by Cambridge Scholars Press.

The purpose of her dissertation, Negative Dialectics and the Cultural Concept of the Anorexic Body, is "to not only make a significant contribution to literary studies, but to also offer insight into a very real and controversial cultural crisis: what critic Kim Chernin called a 'tyranny of slenderness,'" says Angela.

"My goal is to de-mystify not only the "tyranny" of the slender body in our postmodern culture but also related topics such as anti-aging, plastic surgery, and the impact of an influential celebrity culture," she says. "By exposing the surprising ways in which the slender body has been historically linked to social and humanitarian reform, I hope to generate new ways of confronting our own body-conscious society. I believe the slender body is more than just a pop-culture concern and phenomenon; rather, it is an integral part of our changing notions of self and world."

A native southerner, Angela grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and received a B.A. in English from The University of Georgia in Athens. She worked in the corporate world until returning to graduate school at ASU in 1999. After teaching literature and composition courses at ASU and the University of Memphis, she has temporarily taken time off from teaching to finish her dissertation and raise her young family. She plans to graduate with her Ph.D. in English Literature this year.




Upper photo: O'Neal hopes to offer insight into a controversial cultural crisis: what critic Kim Chernin called a 'tyranny of slenderness.'

Lower photo: O'Neal, pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature, working in the Graduate Student Lounge in the Language & Literature Building.