Rachel is currently writing a senior thesis as part of Boston College’s Scholar of the College program, which offers a small number of “exceptional students who have excelled academically in their undergraduate studies” a chance to conduct independent research. Rachel’s thesis is housed within the English department and is advised by Professor Krithika Vachali.

It is a little known fact that Victorian England faced widespread anxiety about a potential energy crisis resulting from the exhaustion of its coal resources. This anxiety is reflected in the literature of the time, and while reading for a class with Professor Vachali in junior year, Rachel was struck by the similarities between the language used by Victorian writers and that used by 21st-century proponents of fossil fuel expansion. In result, her thesis is a comparative analysis of two books from each time period: The Coal Question by William Stanley Jevons (1865) and On the Extension of the English Coal-Fields by Joseph Holdsworth (1866) from the Victorian era, and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein (2022) and A Question of Power by Robert Bryce (2020) from our current era. Rachel argues that Bryce and Epstein’s language and rhetoric is descended from Holdsworth and Jevons’ explicitly imperialist arguments, illuminating the neocolonial power relations embedded within the modern debate over fossil fuels.

The full text will be available here in April 2026.