MAR 2023

Read it now!

Welcome to the sixth volume of the Muhlenberg Academic Review (MAR)! We, along with the members of our executive board, are thrilled to be able to present this journal as a product of the Gamma Iota chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta intercollegiate English honor society. As co-editors-in-chief, our job would not be possible without the support and hard work of our board: senior editors Oyinkansola Adebajo & Anna Bobok, layout editors Grace Alvarado & Rebecca Zipper, and our social media editors and business managers Zev Lonner & Peyton Sloan. We would also like to thank Professor Linda Miller, our faculty advisor, for her continuing dedication and guidance, and Muhlenberg College President Kathleen Harring for her support of our student-led publication. 

This year we were thrilled to receive sixty-one submissions across a wide range of academic disciplines, from economics to biology to music and many more. These essays were then sent anonymously to our fifty-eight contributing editors, who were selected based on professor recommendation. Based on their evaluations and our own readings of the pieces, we were able to narrow it down to a list of finalists, and from there select twelve essays that we felt best represented the interdisciplinary nature of Muhlenberg’s liberal arts curriculum. These were then sent to our team of copy editors, who were assigned to work closely with one or two essays on final edits. To all of our copy and contributing editors, we thank you, and congratulate you on a job well done. 

Despite the variety in subject and discipline of the essays we’ve published in this volume, we feel that all of the works represented here look beyond the familiar to things outside our borders, our comfort zones, and our understandings. Some essays bring to our attention matters of international significance, analyzing economic instability steeped in illicit markets and exploring gender and national pride through the globalization of certain musical styles. Other essays encourage us to think deeply about the plights of our own nation, with a specific emphasis on relationality—the relationship between public health and criminal law, poverty and systemic racism, social media and capitalism, art and immigration policy, or philosophy and colonialism. Others demand new and progressive ways of thinking, exploring innovative theories of literature, musical theatre, neuroscience, biology, and philosophy. We applaud these writers, and are proud to celebrate their passion, creativity, and intellectual fervor.

Thank you for your continued support of our journal. It has been a true pleasure to publish, and we hope it is an equal pleasure to read. 

Cheers,

Lily Magoon & Faith Maldonado

Co-Editors-in-Chief of the Muhlenberg Academic Review