This year’s Voices in Literature and Culture Conference (now in its 14th year!) featured 38 students presenting their analyses of adolescence through themes found in literature, scholarly works, and additional sources, including TV shows and movies. The conference is the annual culmination of the Upper School Advanced Course Perspectives in Literature, which each year looks at a specific theme through a multidisciplinary lens.

"Some of my favorite novels are coming-of-age stories, or stories of people looking back on their teenage years, and I sensed that some of those texts could be meaningful to students," said Upper School English Teacher Zoela Summerfield, who teaches the class. "I also thought it would be interesting/meaningful/meta/cool to study adolescence with adolescents. It's a theme that immediately applies to literally every student in the room."

Topics analyzed and presented by students ranged from the role of music as a healing property that brings adolescents together to adolescent isolation, identity development, dehumanization, the impact of societal expectations of domesticity and purity, and disruptions in adolescence. Each student studied at least three sources, finding connections in such disparate sources as The Girls by Emma Cline, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, and the movie Mean Girls, or by comparing Sula by Toni Morrison and the TV show Euphoria.

"Students have responded in ways that have been surprising, moving, funny, and profoundly insightful," Summerfield reflected when asked about the response to the conference theme. "They've each found various entry points into the material along the way, from the deeply personal to the more macro/social/historical." 

Special thanks to the event’s keynote speaker, award-winning poet and novelist Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat—one of the texts covered in this year’s Perspectives course. All students in the Middle and Upper Schools are invited to submit projects for the conference.

Click here to see photos from the conference!