Madeleine Moino Wants to be a Nurse. So Why is She Winning International Literature Awards?

Madeleine Moino ’26 has no plans to teach English or to pursue a Ph.D. in the field. Her goals: to become a nurse practitioner, and to become proficient enough in Spanish to better communicate with patients.

She certainly doesn’t plan to study the works of Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, best known for his controversial novel “Lolita,” any further. Nabokov isn’t even her favorite author.

And yet, the future nurse practitioner is a devoted English major who won an international award for an essay she wrote on Nabokov during her sophomore year. 

Why?

Simply put: for the love of literature.

A seat at the seminar table

Moino initially came to Holy Cross with a love of reading and writing, but a determination to study premed. “I was hoping to be swayed off of it,” she said of pursuing an English degree. “I really wanted to be, like, a cool woman in STEM.” But the more English classes she took and the more professors she met, the more Moino found she couldn’t stay away: “I just love the department. I love going to office hours and talking about class or new ideas. The door is always open and they're so excited you're there. And that energy is just so exciting.”

And so Moino stopped fighting her fate, and that’s how, in the spring of her sophomore year, she found herself sitting in Professor Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s Nabokov seminar, ready to study an author she’d never read, two years before most students take the course.

Sweeney is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College and a leading scholar on Nabokov, her favorite writer for more than 50 years; she has published books and award-winning essays on his work, co-organized a five-day academic conference, and twice been elected president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. In spring 2024, she was looking forward to teaching her first Nabokov seminar at Holy Cross. Upon learning that Moino, whom Sweeney had taught as a first-year student, was trying to fit in a seminar course before spending junior year in León, Spain, Sweeney invited her to join the class. Seminars are typically made up of seniors, with some juniors, and are not a requirement for the English major. Though the class was small, Moino was the youngest in the room.

“It was super intimidating because I had never read an author that I hadn't interacted with before. As a sophomore, I didn't feel like I had the vocabulary or the understanding of what it would mean to study someone like him who is so international and philosophical,” Moino said. “But I just felt really supported by my classmates. And Professor Sweeney is good about being, like, whatever you bring to the literature is valid and important in our discussions. And so I felt really empowered to speak in class.”

Turns out, Moino had a lot to say.

Conversation and community

“I remember asking Madeleine what she thought of ‘Lolita,’” after one or two classes on the novel, Sweeney recalled. “She sort of paused, and then she said, ‘Well, it is… it is really a brilliant novel. But I do find it distasteful.’ And that was just so Madeleine, to consider the question carefully and then respond to it honestly.”

“I hadn't been in an English class yet where I was like, ‘Wow, I don't know if I like the aesthetics of this literature, but it's interesting nonetheless,’” Moino explained. “That was a new experience that I hadn't had before, that I'm really enjoying this just for the art that it is, even though it's not art that speaks to me. I learned how to approach literature more artistically and the aesthetics of what it's doing versus the social ramifications."

The ability to study and appreciate written works for just the writing itself, to have conversations and dive deep into ideas, is one of the aspects Moino loves most about studying literature, even a title she doesn’t like. It’s also what gave Moino the courage to pursue a topic she had been returning to all semester for her final paper for the Nabokov seminar, despite the lack of scholarly sources that supported her thesis.

The idea: that physical and emotional “distance enables a fantasy of the viewer.”

“Sometimes you feel like something's there, but you’re not willing to take the risk if you’re not finding it in the text so readily and in secondary sources,” Moino explained. “But Professor Sweeney was super encouraging. She's very big on trusting your instincts and what you feel and the writing. And so I did, and it was exciting to work on.”

“There's a whole pattern of imagery of closeness and distance in Nabokov's work that nobody else has ever noticed, but Madeleine did,” Sweeney said. 

Moino’s instincts paid off and earned her the 2024 Ellen Pifer Prize for the best undergraduate essay on Nabokov, an extremely competitive global award administered by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. The judges praised Moino’s essay, “You’re NOT Everything I Imagined: The Distorting Power of Distance in Nabokov’s Works,” for its “intriguing examination of the metaphorical and literal function of distance and proximity in Nabokov’s work and how it relates to Nabokov’s aesthetics and ethics.” Attending the award ceremony via Zoom, alongside prominent global Nabokov scholars — many of whom Moino studied in class — revealed another facet Moino loves about literature: the community.

“It was even more exciting to feel like I was part of a community and contributing to a body of work,” she said. “Even though I don't want to go into a career of literature analysis or critique, to be a student of literature is to be part of a community, and I felt really excited about that."

For the love of literature

But as Moino pointed out, she doesn’t want to make a career out of analyzing literature. So why do it at all?

“Because there is always more to be added, more to be gained, more to be revised,” she said. “It's this conversation that keeps on going. It builds your community because you're always thinking about it and you're always finding people to talk to about it.

“It also makes you like a more creative thinker, which is applicable in many ways,” she continued. “If you feel like you're studying something just to get it right or wrong, that just doesn't foster your confidence that you could be contributing something, at least for me.”

“She's just very passionate about it,” Sweeney said. “That's partly what made all of Madeleine’s essays so successful, because she wanted to write them. It's not a means to an end. She's not trying to get into graduate school, she's not trying to get a credential. I would love for her to continue [in the field], but the fact that it's for her own pleasure makes it more noble.”

And, in the end, Moino believes the skills she’s learned reading literature will in fact make her a better listener, a better observer, a better nurse.

“For me, nursing is about being a listening ear to your patient and having the patience, the understanding, the empathy and the willingness to maybe be wrong. I think it's less diagnostic and more about a collaboration between a patient and a provider,” she explained. “And I think analyzing literature requires a listening ear, a patience, a willingness to be wrong, but also be led by what you're seeing. It's not so different from reading symptoms and coming to a conclusion. You have the primary text in front of you and you're gleaning information from that to make your own diagnosis.”

Sweeney agreed, because to her, one idea that literature teaches is that other people, even if they’re imaginary characters, matter.

“One of the great lessons that Nabokov, often in a very playful or ironic way, keeps demonstrating is that other people are as important as we are. That seems so simple, but I feel that it’s something very hard to practice,” she said. “It's noticing and understanding. It's experiencing empathy. It's analyzing. It's being aware, which means looking more deeply at things and thinking more deeply about other people.”