Fellow Focus: Olivia Gilbert
In this conversation with Pathways Fellow Brooke Luokkala, 2025-26 Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow Olivia Gilbert discusses her thesis project on the censorship of women in film and what the Fox Center's 2025-26 research theme "Life/Story" means to her.
Brooke Luokkala: Hi, Olivia. Thank you for joining me. Can you tell me about your project?
Olivia Gilbert: My thesis is about censorship. I'm a women's studies and film double major, so it's interdisciplinary in that way. I'm focusing on three different films. The first film is a Mae West film called She Done Him Wrong (1933). I'm going to first explore Mae West's role in writing and creating that movie, what her life was like, and the censorship that followed her popularity in Hollywood. Then, I'm going to explore the censorship of pornography by sex war feminists Andrea Dorkin and Catherine McKinnon, and their perspective on wanting to censor pornographic materials on the basis that feminist ideas about pornography were based in the domination of women and of perpetuating violence and rape against women. Finally, I'm going to explore more contemporary representations of sex and prostitution in films, looking [specifically] at Pretty Woman (1990).
[My thesis] project argues that we've had the same issues with representation of women and sex and obscenity in film over time. There has to be something that breaks the pattern so that it stops repeating itself. My paper will have particular interest in Mae West's life as I frame the entire project around her as a figure.
BL: So, how does your thesis project fit the Fox Center’s 2025-26 research theme of “Life/Story”? And what does “Life/Story” mean to you?
OG: I think that the theme of Life/Story gives space for people to revisit others’ lives and think about them in the contemporary moment, like I do with Mae West. It's important to be able to take stories as not just isolated occurrences but how they serve as examples of historic repetition.
BL: And what is your favorite part about being a Fox Fellow so far? Or, if you don't have a favorite part yet, what are you looking forward to this academic year?
OG: I have loved meeting all of the other Undergraduate Honors Fellows and participating in Fox Center events, like the Keynote with Paterson Joseph. I really enjoyed getting to meet him and it made me excited for the other speakers that I'm going to get to listen to and hear from [this academic year].
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.