Sophie Swengel ✽

✽ recently graduated from Kent State University’s Honors College with a dual bachelors degree in history and English and a minor in creative writing. For a year she served as managing editor of Luna Negra, Kent State’s longest running student arts magazine, representing them at the 2026 College Media Association Convention in New York. She was also long-standing co-chair of the May 4 Task Force, the historic student group who have raised awareness of the Kent State shootings since 1975. Her writing earned her numerous university awards and scholarships, including first place in the Wick Poetry Center’s honors poetry competition and, for two years in a row, the Department of History’s prestigious Gold Pen essay award. Her essays have been published in Luna Negra, the Kent Stater, and Kentcore, while her creative work can be found in past issues of Luna Negra, Crayfish, and Brainchild. Her research interests include cultural, subcultural, music, fashion and women’s history, as well as the wider use of history to tell ethical and humanizing stories of fully lived lives. In the spring of 2026 she defended her senior honors history thesis, a historiographical, cultural, and narrative analysis of the Who’s rock opera, Tommy, which she is continuing to research for eventual publication. She is due to continue her studies at Emerson College in Boston this fall.

She is also a freelance writer and model, seamstress, vintage fashion-and-things enthusiast, wannabe Pre-Raphaelite princess, voracious reader, armchair psychologist, and general rock and roll woman. These interests inform much of her writing and research, accessible below.

Disclaimer: While Sophie is well versed in numerous more modern webhosting softwares, such as Wordpress and Drupal, and attentive to current standards of web accessibility, this website is her way of having fun with scratch HTML and CSS in her own time and should not be percieved as evidence of a lack of acknowledgment of such. The internet deserves to be a fun place and this spot happens to be Sophie’s part.