Meet our intern: Connor Curran

Connor and Walden the Cat

Connor Curran is a senior English student at the University at Albany.

Raised in Davenport, Delaware County, Connor is currently an intern with the NYS Writers Institute with a focus on promoting our events to the campus community and working to release more of our vast archives to the general public. During his time at UAlbany, Connor has thoroughly engaged with both academic and creative writing and is also president of The Guild, UAlbany's boardgame club.

Winner of the University's 2023-24 Arlene Steinberg Prize -- "awarded to the outstanding junior or senior English major in the field of twentieth-century fiction, poetry, or theater" -- Connor plans to pursue a career in publishing. When he isn't buried in a book, Connor can be found baking a wide array of sweets or practicing his origami.

Q: What drew you to major in English, and did your expectations match reality?

A: Funnily enough, English actually wasn’t my first choice of major.  When I first enrolled at UAlbany, I did so as a double major in Biology and Chemistry.  Literary studies and the sciences were both my favorite subjects in high school, but science had a deeper allure to me.  Something about the idea of investigating the principles underlying our universe was fascinating to me.  I’d spent my entire childhood talking about becoming a scientist, and that didn’t leave me once I was older.  It also helped that I’d just won the Bausch and Lomb Honorary Science Award.  It felt less like a choice and more like something I was supposed to do. 

During my first year of college, however, I quickly lost interest in my work.  My biology classes consisted of memorizing multiple textbooks’ worth of information, and my chemistry classes were mostly focused on memorizing mathematical formulas.  While it wasn’t particularly difficult for me, I couldn’t find a way to keep myself invested in it. 

During my second semester that year, things changed when I took my first English class, Fabulist Short Fiction, alongside my Writing and Critical Inquiry class.  Both of them were taught by Professor Moriah Hampton.  In WCI, I was free to explore whatever topics that I was interested in writing about, so long as I did so with academic rigor.  In Fabulist Short Fiction, I found myself able to critically examine texts without losing interest in them. 

In hindsight, becoming an English major should’ve been an obvious decision, even before that moment.  I’ve always been a voracious bookworm, a tentative writer, and I had even admitted during high school that my English teacher had been the most influential mentor I’d had. 

It wasn’t until that moment, though, when I finally started engaging with texts and writing at the college level that I began to consider that English might be the right major for me.  It still took me some time to commit to that transition.  There was plenty of discussion with older friends who had switched majors previously, talks with family, and even a bit of inspiration from an interview with an actress. 

When the time came to register for classes, I officially made the switch to major in English.  I haven’t regretted it for a single second.  Studying as an English major has allowed me to engage with the material I love on a deeper level, examining the cultural, political, and social issues that often underline our work, intentionally or not.  It’s truly fascinating to analyze how all of these incredible authors, contemporary and classic, weave together engrossing narratives that are convincing statements about our past, present, and future.

Q: What kinds of books have you read during your time as an English major — more contemporary or mostly the classics?  How do the classics hold up for you now — do they still feel relevant or do the newer works resonate more?

A: During the past several years, I’ve read a pretty even mix of contemporary and classic, though most of my classes have focused specifically on one or the other.  Much of that is due to the topic of each class.

A class on postcolonial fiction might only have works by contemporary authors while one on Shakespeare and the poetics of revenge might only have classic literature.  I think that one of the most beautiful things about literature is its interactive nature.  No matter what the author did or didn’t intend the audience to get out of their work, the reader decides for themself what they take away from it.  As a result, I think that the classics have remained just as relevant as contemporary literature. 

Take Bram Stoker's Dracula as an example.  Yes, it contains plenty of themes about xenophobia and the nature of intimacy that are heavily tied to the period in which it was created, but its age hasn’t given it any less impact on the cultural zeitgeist.  Perhaps the way readers engage with it has changed, such as openly criticizing the blatant antisemitism and British nationalism that leaps off the pages if one takes a moment to look for it, but it hasn’t become less relevant. 

Human beings are pattern-brained creatures.  It is very easy for us to connect the themes we see in classic literature to the problems we face in the modern day. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein’s warning about the dangers of attempting to overthrow nature with the power of science isn’t solely relegated to experiments with galvanism in the early 1800s.  That message can be related to modern science as well, even extending to the current attempts to use artificial intelligence.

The advantage that contemporary literature has is its ability to directly engage with events within recent history, or even ones that are still currently happening.  Thus, it becomes easier to see the patterns that are woven throughout the text.

Q: Were there any authors or books that completely changed the way you think?

A: Oh god, that’s a tough question.  I mean, what hasn’t?  Every piece of literature that I’ve read has stuck with me in some manner.  I suppose there are a few that I can see as being the most influential for me.  The first would have to be the "Magic Tree House" series by Mary Pope Osborne. 

When I was a very young kid, around 5 or 6, I hated reading.  I just couldn’t sit still.  One day, though, one of my teachers, Ms. Fleury, gave me the first of the Magic Treehouse books to read.  I reluctantly took it from her, and once I started it, I was hooked.  From then on, I grabbed whatever books I could get ahold of.  I read anywhere and everywhere; in the car on the way to school, during lunch and recess, in my bed until my parents were heading to bed. 

Stephen King also influenced my interests quite a bit.  I read his "Dark Tower" series in middle school.  That helped me branch out from the world of fantasy to the weird and terrifying worlds of horror that now exist.  During my time here at UAlbany, truly just about every author that I’ve read has given me a new perspective, from class and in my personal reading.  Shakespeare, of course, has been fascinating to read.  He’s a very unserious author, constantly putting dirty jokes into his plays, but still crafting detailed, thought-provoking characters that challenge stereotypes about class and race.  Ursula K. Le Guin has shown me the delicate intricacies of building living, breathing worlds that you’d swear you could walk right into. 

I don’t think any of them have entirely changed my way of thinking, but they have certainly all shaped it in one way or another.  I honestly think that the biggest changes to my thinking have come from working within different disciplines rather than specific authors.  While studying here, I’ve taken minors in both forensic science and anthropology.  Studying forensic science allowed me to pursue a narrow aspect of science that I still found interesting without solely depending on it.  As a result, the scientific mindset hasn’t left me entirely. 

Studying forensics especially, knowing the kinds of evidence required to execute a specific case, has made me a very critical writer.  I’ve adapted the ways in which forensic scientists and detectives look for evidence of a crime to look for the weaknesses in an argument.  I know how to point out what bits of information are only circumstantial to an argument, what pieces might be different given greater context or examined with a different lens.  Anthropology, on the other hand, has given me an entirely different way of looking at literature.  In particular, I’ve taken courses on anthropology in both science fiction and horror.  Looking at these kinds of texts anthropologically, it’s fascinating to see what vastly different information you can get from the same text while looking at it from a different perspective.  Rather than looking at how the different pieces of a novel might create some point the author is trying to make, looking at those pieces anthropologically reveals a lot about the kind of culture that might lead to the creation of such a work. 

While the English major may point to the use of a repeated phrase as a symbol for abusive relationships, the anthropologist may point to that as denoting the possible prevalence of abusive relationships within the author’s life or culture. 

Learning more about these different disciplines has given me entirely different ways to look at literary material, and putting those skills together has allowed me to create significantly more detailed and persuasive arguments.

Q: What kinds of jobs or industries are you considering after graduation?

A: Whenever I mention that I’m an English major to my family and friends, the first thing they ask me is if I want to be a teacher.  Every time, I have to repeat that teaching is the only English career I’m certain I want nothing to do with. 

While I’ve been a student here at UAlbany, I’ve taken a few creative writing classes.  However, while I may be a bit naïve, I am not stupid enough to think that relying solely on my ability as a fiction writer will be enough to have a successful career.  I’d love it if that were the case, but it’s nearly impossible.  Now, I would still like to continue it as a hobby though, and maintain some connection to creative writing. 

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that after graduation, I’d like to go into publishing.  While I don’t want to rely solely on my own creative writing, I would love to be a part of the process of bringing other authors’ work to life and finding them their audience.  I know that publishing will be a difficult field to jump straight into, however, so I am also looking into copywriting jobs as a potential back-up in the meantime.

Q: Did your professors ever talk about careers outside of academia or publishing?

A: Surprisingly, most of my English professors haven’t talked too much about careers outside of academia, or even careers in general.  Professor Ineke Murakami has talked to me about English careers quite a bit, but those discussions were mostly about the resources that are available to me through the university, like the English internship program. 

Ironically, the non-English professors that I’ve had have given me some of the more interesting English career ideas.  Professor Ryan Thurman, whose classes I took for my forensic science minor, talked to me about possibly looking into grant writing.  As an English major, I’d have the writing skills to write convincing grant proposals, and my time dabbling with the sciences would give me some knowledge of the principles at work in the experiments that may be proposed.  As such, I would be in the unique position of being able to more easily understand the purpose and processes of these experiments and determine what information was absolutely necessary for the proposals. 

While not entirely outside of academia, my general academic advisor during my first year, Dr. Kathryn Fore, talked to me about my options when I expressed interest in the English program.  She disclosed to me that she herself had been an English major and had found fulfilling work without being a teacher.  She was another one of the reasons why I took the leap to switch majors. 

Q: Do you think your literary education helped you better understand people, culture, or the world?

A: Absolutely.  Learning how to critically examine literature isn’t just about understanding metaphors and symbolism.  It’s about understanding how human beings express themselves, their lives, their struggles, and their perspectives through writing.  Literary education helps students to engage with a form of pattern-recognition and media literacy that can be useful in hundreds of different careers, plenty of which may not even be considered within the English field. 

One of literary education’s main goals, at least from my perspective on this side of the education system, is to show students how the many different aspects of people’s lives are connected and influence one another in a myriad of ways.  It’s part of why the idea of intersectionality is so important to us.  Individual people, their cultures, and the world at large cannot be simplified a single concept.  Each of us is made up of thousands of different pieces, influences from our culture, and the different social identities that make up who we are.  It also shows us that, despite all of these pieces, human beings aren’t all that different from each other. 

We come from vastly different cultures and nations from all across the world, but if you look at our stories, we share much more in common than we differ.  Struggles across the world differ greatly by the culture in which they take place, but at their core, they often relate to issues with class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. that we all experience in unique ways. 

If you could have dinner with any writer (living or dead), who and why?

If I could have dinner with any writer, I would love to sit down with Paul Tremblay. The way he writes his characters and manages to breath life into them by choosing which aspects of them to add detail to has fascinated me, and I would relish the chance to talk with him about how he goes about writing characters such as Merry in his 2015 novel A Head Full of Ghosts. I would also like to ask him about how popular culture influences his work. He intentionally makes references to pieces of popular culture, like The Exorcist, anchoring it to our reality in a way that most authors desperately avoid.

Connor just launched his LinkedIn page. Connect with him and keep him in mind for job prospects.