Sophie Swengel ✽

✽ is a graduating honors senior at Kent State University earning her dual bachelors degree in history and English with a minor in creative writing. She is currently managing editor of Luna Negra, Kent State’s longest running student arts magazine, having recently represented them at the 2026 College Media Association Convention in New York. She is also long-standing co-chair of the May 4 Task Force, a historic student group who have raised awareness of the Kent State shootings since 1975. Her writing has 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. She recently defended her senior honors history thesis, a historiographical, cultural, and narrative analysis of the Who’s rock opera, Tommy, which she will be 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.