Izzy Welsh is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences from Los Angeles, California, majoring in English and Cinema and Media Studies with a minor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. Her academic interests center on memoir, narrative structure, and the ethics of storytelling. As part of her senior thesis, she explores the unstable relationship between memory and truth through a comparative analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Patti Smith’s M Train. Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, her project examines how both texts depict memory not as a static record of the past but as a dynamic act of reconstruction. She considers how personal perception, trauma, and exile shape recollection, and how narrative becomes a means of meaning-making. Through this work, she asks whether memoir seeks to recover truth or reimagine it entirely.
Izzy Welsh
Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow
2025—2026 Forum on Truth
Izzy Welsh
Executive Board, Wolf Undergraduate Humanities Forum
English, Cinema & Media Studies
Kaleidoscopic Memory – Orientation through Disorientation in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Patti Smith’s M Train
This project explores the unstable relationship between memory and truth through a comparative analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Patti Smith’s M Train. Both texts grapple with the fragmented nature of recollection, where truth is refracted through personal perception, trauma, and exile. Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, the project will examine how memory operates not as a static archive but as a dynamic act of reconstruction. This project questions whether these texts aim to recover truth or redefine it—suggesting that memory is not about retrieving facts but about creating meaning through narrative. By situating these memoirs in conversation with each other, and engaging with intertextual references, it will explore how truth can be aesthetic, unstable, and deeply personal shaped by cultural, emotional, and psychological contexts.