Laurel Turner

Background

About Laurel Turner

I am an undergraduate at Yale University pursuing simultaneous BA/MA in English literature, graduating in the fall of 2024. I am currently working at the Princeton Review as a tutor and at the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning as a writing partner. Over the summer, I will be working as a literary journalist in Brooklyn, NY under the Yale Solomon Research Fellowship in LGBTQ+ studies, studying fractured perspective, postcolonial theory, and the history of the trans memoir. I am a member of WORD at Yale, Yale's premier spoken word / poetry group, a reader for the Yale Review, a member of Manuscript society at Yale, and have published essays with the Yale Daily News, the Yale Herald, and poems in various campus chapbooks. I am on the board of Trans@Yale and am the cofounder of Yale's Gender Peer Mentors program. Previously, I worked with the Yale Office of LGBTQ+ resources as a peer liason and in the department of mathematics as a grader for their linear algebra and abstract algebra courses. Although for the past two years I have been studying fiction writing and literary criticism, before that I was a mathematician. I took extensive upper level and graduate coursework and worked on multiple different research projects. My applied research focused primarily on Fourier analysis and fMRI data—I have a paper published in Nature Neuroscience as third author. I contributed to and helped release a Python package. My pure mathematics research focused mostly on Veech groups, dynamical systems, translation surfaces, and number theory. I have professional working proficiency in French and am proficient in Python. In my free time, I play electric guitar and competitive chess.