Bethanie is a first year PhD English student. She was born in Hemet, California and moved to Western Colorado when she was 11 years old. There she became an athlete and spent a lot of time in the outdoors, hiking, hunting, and fishing. These experiences served her well when she became a Marine Corps Officer in 2011. She served one tour in Afghanistan in 2013, where, among many other duties, she was put in charge of a small team that assessed the security of a 1,600-acre joint forces base that housed over 25,000 troops in the Helmand Province and the surrounding area. She recently ended her career in the Marine Corps Reserve as a Major.

Now, she is interested in recovering the voices of women who have fought as warriors throughout history. Their stories have been washed away by the male only stories that predominate war writing culture. Her scholarship also investigates gender theory of female narratives through the lens of the abilities of their bodies. Above all, she believes the narratives that have bound women to small, weak, feeble, fainting bodies, has been a propaganda tool of patriarchal power which needed women to be physically inferior for men to stay in power.

Today, she lives in Carlsbad, California with her partner, Andrew Lopez, whom she met while deployed to Afghanistan, his five-year-old daughter Lyra, and their two dogs Penny and June. Bethanie enjoys swimming, running, art, jazz, and she is making a return to surfing.

She is very happy to be at Claremont Graduate University, since it allows her to integrate the disciplines of religion, history, philosophy, gender theory, and art to encompass the full breadth of her scholarship.