Ellie Burke, Silliman College ‘24

being bold and being critical

By Sam Heimowitz.

Ellie Burke is a charismatic first year in Silliman College from Kansas City, Missouri. As a potential English or history major, she loves reading and writing, and is fascinated by both American and world history. In particular, she is inspired by people making thoughtful analyses of the past, bringing historical moments into contemporary resonance. This past fall semester, she enrolled in a first-year seminar on South African literature with Professor Stephanie Newell, culminating in an analytical research paper on humor as a subversive means of resistance in South Africa during apartheid. Having read about 30 pages of comedian and late-night host Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born A Crime, and having looked at artist William Kentridge’s mixed media and avant-garde and performative art pieces, Ellie discovered that humor and absurdity could be used in both subversive and yet dark and discombobulating ways to resist—but sometimes it was unsettling to laugh. Through this class, she also drew parallels between South Africa and the U.S.; the two countries learned from each other in their manifestations and institutionalization of racism and racist practices.

Throughout her research and writing process, Burke combed through databases like Articles+ and JSTOR, browsed Alexander Street, perused Trevor Noah’s reels, and watched the documentary You Laugh But It’s True, which describes Noah’s philosophy and outlook on life. Even over Zoom and at home in Missouri, Ellie was able to navigate the complexities of Yale’s library system, delving into questions of when it is appropriate to laugh, who truly has a monopoly on discourse, and how people fight the system by mocking the system.

Outside her major academic interests, Ellie is a board member of the Yale Drama Coalition, acting in and producing a wide variety of productions. She has also done some work for the Yale Historical Review, and she is a member of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project (YUPP), working to provide accessible menstrual products to incarcerated women.

Some advice she would like to offer to first-year students and non-first years alike is very much in line with what her first-year seminar professor told her: college students never need to reinvent the wheel with anything that they are doing, but should always be bold and critical in their analyses. Even when a student is unsure about something, just go for it. She also strongly encourages other students to browse and search for courses that they otherwise would never have the opportunity to take, and then enroll in that course no matter how daunting—alas, one only has 36 credits at Yale, so why not make every single one of them count?