Sam Wooley
UW Honors Graduates
Sam Wooley

English
Designation: Departmental Honors
Honors Grads 2017/2018
Proudest Moment: Finding my best friends at Rainy Dawg, completing my thesis, and graduating Magna Cum Laude!
Thesis: "We Gon' See the Future First": Subjection, Melancholy, and Queer Utopian Aesthetics in Frank Ocean's Blonde
samwooley@comcast.netOriginally from Edmonds, Washington, I transferred to the UW my sophomore year after a short stint at Occidental College in Los Angeles. I quickly declared my English major after taking Jessica Burstein's captivating course on Modern and Postmodern Literature, where I fell in love with Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. In my senior year, I completed the English Honors program, which allowed me to more closely explore my interest in popular media and its relation to temporality and identity. Specifically, I explored Frank Ocean's recent album Blonde and the future-oriented queer utopian aesthetic I understood it to be articulating. Outside of school, I have been involved with Rainy Dawg Radio since my first quarter on campus. That Fall, I applied to be a volunteer DJ at the student-run radio station. I ended up DJing there for two years, and this most recent year, I was able to serve as the station's Music Director. Rainy Dawg was a wonderful experience for me, allowing me to ground myself in a community within this massive campus. My future plans are currently undecided: in the next year, I hope to travel, write, and keep making rent, and in the long-term future I aim to pursue a career in either academia, high school education, literary publishing, or public radio, or perhaps some combination of these.