February 5, 2025

Welcome Alycia Gilbert to Honors!

The UW Honors Program is excited to announce that Alycia Gilbert is the new Curriculum & Academic Operations Manager! Alycia is also currently teaching an Honors course this winter titled, “Rose-Colored Retrospectives: Period Media and Cultures of Nostalgia.” Continue reading this week’s Community Spotlight to learn more about her and what she will contribute to our community.

Here in Honors I… collaborate with and support Honors faculty as they create exciting, engaging courses that will challenge and inspire our students. I help develop the Interdisciplinary Honors curriculum, assist with Departmental Honors across campus and manage the Honors Program’s academic operations. I also help oversee programmatic operations in the Honors office to keep things running smoothly!

I like thinking about & studying… adaptations! My PhD work at UW focused on literature and adaptation studies: how historical novels are reimagined into films, comic books, plays—you name it. I love tracing how stories travel over time and across different cultures, exploring how adaptations reimagine both their source texts and the power structures at play within them. I have a particular soft spot for nineteenth-century adaptations, from Jane Austen miniseries to schlocky Dracula movies. I’m also a big horror fan (the campier, the better!), I love teaching and working with students, and at any given moment, I’m thinking about the chicken shawarma sandwich at Al Bacha. 

My first week in college… I signed up for a jogging class, when I’ve always, always hated running. I was so determined to knock out my physical education requirement that it never occurred to me that I could wait and see what courses would be offered in later semesters. I spent fourteen weeks sweating in the Tennessee heat instead of backpacking or salsa dancing.