Celebrating Our Graduate-- Laine Barriga, B.A. 2025

We are proud to share this personal statement from Laine Barriga, who recently completed the Comparative and World Literature BA program. In their statement, they reflect on the experiences, discoveries, and meaningful connections that shaped their time in the program. They also explore how the experience has influenced their growth and continues to guide their path beyond graduation. Congratulations to Laine on this achievement and the journey ahead!

My academic trajectory has been been unconventional, to say the least. I initially began taking college courses while still in high school with the dream of transferring to a UC campus. Life brought me to the Bay Area shortly after graduating and I became a full time student at Berkeley City College (BCC). In the beginning, I was an ambitious philosophy and global studies major. At BCC I enrolled in a class called “Multicultural American Literature,” read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and was moved to tears. I’d never been so affected by a piece of literature and remember writing a paper on the book using the theoretical lenses I gained in my training as a philosophy student. After meeting with a professor in the philosophy department, I became aware of the field of Comparative Literature. It was here that I found a home for my curiosities and interests. I ended up taking a 6-year break from school to work and returned to the community college system again during the pandemic.

I transferred to SFSU’s Comparative and World Literature department and completely fell in love with research and the critical study of literature. Under the guidance of Professor Dane Johnson and Professor Persis Karim, I applied for the Marcus Undergraduate Research Fellowship to pursue a year-long archival research project. During the Marcus Fellowship, I studied 19th-century Louisiana Creole literature. My project focused on the overlooked literary contributions of New Orleans’ Francophone free people of color during the Civil War-era. I analyzed and translated poems and short stories published in the bilingual abolitionist newspaper The New Orleans Tribune, highlighting important voices that have been neglected in the broader history of the abolitionist movement. I presented my research at two prestigious undergraduate research conferences at Stanford and Johns Hopkins University. My paper was also published in The Macksey Journal. I am so grateful for Professor Karim’s mentorship and research opportunities that I received at SF State, especially in the Humanities and Comparative and World Literature Department. 

I graduated in May with my B.A. in Comparative and World Literature and a minor in French. I am happy to announce that in the fall I will start a PhD program in English at UCLA. I could not have gotten here without the support of the faculty at SF State  and all of the professors that believed in me along the way. As a first generation college graduate with an unconventional trajectory, I never thought that the pursuit of a doctorate level education was possible. I am thrilled to continue the pursuit of scholarly research in the Humanities.