Now I understand why this is a research university. You can research literally anything here.
- Name
- Arusa
- Class of
- 2026
- International Studies
Arusa Malik loves fictional superheroine She-Ra and prefers comics to novels. As a First-Year Fellow with the Sheridan Libraries, she combed through comics, postcards, political cartoons, and even soap to understand feminism and women’s movements in the United States. Malik, now a junior majoring in political science and international studies, enjoyed identifying feminist symbols in her research. She found the same cats, big hats, flowers, and hyper-feminine items in 1920s suffragette postcards that she did in 1970s liberation comics about Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
The 1970s It Ain’t Me Babe Comix (taken from a Bob Dylan song) focused on stories of multiple female superheroes from a new angle. “It was fascinating and combined a lot of the superheroes I read about as a kid,” Malik says. “It also inspired my final project.”
Malik’s First-Year Fellow experience led to her becoming a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, which gives Krieger School students $10,000 to conduct research over three years. Her focus has shifted to analyzing foreign policy responses between the Yugoslav Wars and the Global War on Terror.
