Resources for Graduate Students
Graduate Student Profiles
Samara Cahill
![Samara Cahill [photo]](photo.jpg)
Doctoral Student
English
My goal is to teach college-level English, with specializations in Gender Studies and eighteenth-century English literature. Notre Dame has given me excellent preparation for this by very generously providing me with the financial and scholarly means to pursue my projects. It’s truly phenomenal to have access to Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), the rare books collections in the Hesburgh Library, and Notre Dame’s extensive microfilm collection of 18th-century works.
Notre Dame granted me a Presidential Fellowship, and, in year 3, the Gender Studies Program granted me a Gender Studies Pre-doctoral Teaching Fellowship. This has given me an excellent opportunity to expand my teaching experience, including teaching a course of my own design—“Virgins and Vixens of Enlightenment England.” The English department also enables graduate students to teach freshman composition, which has nicely complemented my work with the upper-classmen in Gender Studies and literature classes.
I’ve had a very rich experience at Notre Dame. People here are friendly as well as intellectually serious. Faculty members are amazingly accessible and have really gone above and beyond my professional expectations in helping me to network. The members of my dissertation committee have been invaluable not only with scholarship, but also with the important practical considerations that confront a young professional. I never expected the amount of attention, time, and guidance that I have received from scholars one-on-one at Notre Dame.
