ENGL 2599

Note: My review of this class right after I took it was deleted for some reason, so this review is from a semester later. I absolutely loved having Lara as a professor. She is incredibly smart and one of my favorite professors I've had at UVA. The topic of this class when I took it was Literature and Medicine. We covered a wide variety of topics in medicine through different forms of literature from poems to plays to short stories to novels. Classes were seminar discussion-style and always pushed me intellectually and really helped me grow as a writer and reader. We also took two "field trips" to the health sciences library where we got to see artifacts and old medical textbooks and received lectures on the beginnings of the UVA hospital system. I'm pretty sure the grade was based on participation in discussions, reading quizzes (which were really easy and we took every week), three essays, and a final. Lara was a pretty tough grader, but I think that her grades were fair and consistent with the expectations she set at the beginning of the class. Overall, I would highly recommend this class or other classes with Lara for your first or second writing requirement.

Lara and her class is great! If you are interested in medicine, it is really interesting and pertinent to the history and revolution of healthcare. The readings are engaging and interesting, and I often found myself putting readings ahead of other homework. It was not a tiny amount of reading, but not overwhelming either. Typically what you would expect of a 2000 Lit class. 3 Papers total with reading quizzes once a week, and if you followed the rough guidelines for the paper, you got a fair grade. Lara is not out to make her class the most challenging or unfair, but wants her students to engage in discussion and analysis of what they are reading. 10/10 recommend especially for a 2WR, totally worth it and not like pulling teeth as I hear other 2WR are.