Harris Sockel grew up in Lower Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, and attended Lower Merion High School. In high school, he participated in theatre and music activities, acting in school shows and singing in Pennsylvania’s all-state and all-eastern choirs.

A Weinberg junior at Northwestern, Harris is studying American literature and French, and is also a student in the creative writing program for poetry. His favorite writers include: Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, Herman Melville, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robert Frost and Charles Juliet.

Harris is a former musical director of Purple Haze, a co-ed a cappella group at NU. See him sing in a YouTube video. Harris enjoys carrying his pitch pipe around campus, and he has played classical piano for 14 years.

Harris also tutors middle-schoolers in Evanston for the America Reads Program and tutors Northwestern undergraduates in calculus for the Gateway Science Workshop Program. He has been a counselor for Northwestern’s Freshman Urban Program and is an English Department representative on the Student Advisory Board.

For the past two summers, Harris has held a teaching internship with Summerbridge of Greater Philadelphia. A division of AmeriCorps, Summerbridge places college students in classrooms across the country to teach their own classes to middle-schoolers in summer academic enrichment programs. Harris taught math and French classes to Philadelphia middle-schoolers. He completed a research project last summer as well, concerning intertextuality in male adolescent narrative. Specifically, Harris examined J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and its implicit and explicit references to Dickens, Hardy, Hemingway and other writers.