Irene Van Riper grew up in Northern California and earned her BA in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2012. In Santa Cruz, work in agroecology and sustainable farming systems brought her to North Mississippi, where she completed research for her undergraduate thesis. In 2014, Irene returned to Mississippi to earn her MA in Southern Studies through the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She is currently writing her thesis about challenges and opportunities in the development of local food systems in North Mississippi.

I’m currently a PhD Candidate in History as well as a Graduate Writing Fellow for the third year in a row. My dissertation project is a religious history of the Space Race. It focuses on the role of Cold War space exploration within American religious culture during the latter half of the twentieth century. I was very lucky to be one of the first students involved in the Graduate Writing Fellows program. I’ve had the opportunity to work with upper-level History undergraduate courses, helping students learn how to write more persuasive and engaging research papers within the field. I’ve worked one-on-one with several writing-intensive courses as well as the Senior Seminar classes for History majors each Spring semester.

I am a Kansas native with a Bachelors of Science in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Kansas. I am currently in the Experimental Psychology Masters/Ph.D. program at the University of Mississippi. My research interests have gone from neurodegenerative disorders to cognitive psychology. I am interested in what role news article headlines have on inference and memory, as well as the spread of misinformation via social media. I literally study how readers infer and spread written information. I became a Graduate Writing Fellow because I am passionate about research and I feel many psychology undergraduates are not properly exposed to the writing aspect that research entails. I also love basketball, sunflowers, and sparkly ruby slippers.