Alumni Feature: Sovay Hansen (’03)
by Olivia Hansen
Sovay Hansen joined Tucson Waldorf School as a preschooler and continued on to be in the first graduating 6th grade class in 2003, taught by Sandra Cook. Sovay then attended middle school at Utterback Middle School and high school at Tucson High Magnet School. Upon graduating high school she took a gap year and worked as a live-in nanny for a family in Seattle, WA. In 2010 she started college at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, one of the few public liberal arts schools in the country. During the first half of senior year, Sovay lived in Berlin and studied German language at the Goethe-Institute. In 2015 she began her fully funded PhD in Literature and German Studies at the University of Arizona, which she completed in March 2022. In short, Sovay’s dissertation focuses on the way female desire is conveyed in British and German modern literature of the interwar years (1918-1939). Sovay’s recent article, “Katherine Mansfield’s Desperate Housewives and Metonymic Desire,” will be published by Katherine Mansfield Studies, out with Edinburgh University Press in October 2022. During her PhD fellowship at the University of Arizona, Sovay taught English for six years and has won teaching awards for her interdisciplinary curriculum.
Sovay currently lives in the West University neighborhood near the University of Arizona and is applying for jobs both inside and outside of academia. Outside of work, Sovay likes to hike, bike ride, cook, read, bake, and watch trashy and quality TV. To this day, two of her closest friends are those she met in Grade 1 at Tucson Waldorf School and she and Sandra Cook meet for coffee whenever they find the time!