By Patricia Pixler
Student Reporter
The end of the year brings a number of activities: finals, family, holidays, and food. Everyone can be pulled every which way to take care of all of their obligations. Beyond the obligations, it seems that when December begins, people naturally think of the previous months.
People consider what went well during the year, what was enjoyed, what was missed and what could have changed. With thoughts of change comes a desire to make resolutions.
Eating better, exercising more, better self-care more time for family; these are the usual resolutions that people begin to consider and start with the turn of the year. As so many people know, getting resolutions to stick is difficult.
Gyms are packed full until March, perhaps April. Eating better lasts until the draw for chocolate and more cannot be ignored.
Self-care is lost in the rush of the semester. There’s never enough time for family visits, especially if they are in another state.
“I try [at normal resolutions],” said Dr. Roxie James, assistant professor of English at Northwestern. “They just don’t work for me.”
Instead, James focuses more on attainable resolutions. As an English professor, she said it is no surprise her resolutions revolve around reading and writing.
An early resolution for James will be working on her special topics Composition I course: fairy tales. The class is a new addition to the English department’s offerings for spring. “I love the class and the opportunity,” James said.
The class will go over fairytales rooted deep in cultures, nortthe ones by Disney. The flyer for the glass features cinderella’s well-known glass slipper splashed covered in blood. While everyone knows the Disney version, the version for the class is from
France in 1700’s. James said she hopes to introduce students to another side of the tales they grew up with as children.
Another passion of James’s is popular culture. Currently James and the chair of the English, foreign language and humanities department, Dr. Kathryn Lane, are working on a special topics journal collection. “It’s about criminals as heroes,” James explained. “It’s grown so much.”James plans to work on the journal collection over break and next semester as both she and Lane want to expand the project. “We received many more submissions than we expected,” James said.
A yearlong resolution for James will be to attend more academic conferences in 2019. In the past, James has attended the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, the British Women Writers Conference and the Midwest Modern Language Association conferences.
James said she plans to go to more conferences as she enjoys learning and meeting more academics like herself. James’s main personal resolution for the upcoming year is to find a new book series. One of her favorite series is the “Harry Potter” franchise.
James said she enjoys the fantastic element to the works and hopes to find another series in the same style. Preferably, James said she would want the series to be young adult fiction, as she enjoys the genre as well. Yet she mainly hopes to find another series in fantasy.
“It’s the magic,” James said. “The fantasy. I love it.”