Carol Pertuz | Exploration of the Infinite Wound and Its Interstices as the Core of the Migratory Experience in Literature with a Child’s Perspective

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My research, positioned at the intersection of childhood, literary, and migration studies, proposes a framework centred on two symbolic motifs—the infinite wound and the frontier—to analyse migration narratives through the lens of childhood. Through close reading and comparative analysis, I examine a curated corpus of nine literary works that foreground a child-centred perspective on migration.

Marije van Lankveld | Settler Colonialism by Minority Communities: Irish Women Writers at the North-American Frontier

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This project explores how Irish migrant women in North America positioned themselves in relation to settler colonial discourses through their writings. This will be examined through qualitative and quantitative analyses of a corpus of texts by Irish women settlers, which contain representations of the frontier, Indigenous peoples, and the natural environment and landscape.

Sarah Badwy | Learning to Read Ideologies for Citizenry

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The focus of my research is the skill of ideological critical reading. This involves students analyzing imaginations in literary texts, examining so called “representations.” The premise of ideological critical reading is that language is inherently political, meaning that all texts convey a particular perspective on the world around us.

Marit van de Warenburg | Between Remembrance and Appropriation: Transcultural circulations of Poetry and Song

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Marit van de Warenburg | Utrecht University
Cultural transmission is occurring all the time: cultural carriers circulate and are adapted to new circumstances and media and, in the form of translations, to other languages. Sometimes, however, cultural transmission is explicitly challenged. Particular reuses of pre-existing cultural carriers are then perceived as illegitimate. Think, for instance, of contemporary debates about cultural appropriation. In such debates, challenges to cultural transmission spark reflections on identity and on who can adopt what heritage. The project “Between Remembrance and Appropriation: Transcultural Circulations of Poetry and Song” analyzes such debates, reframing them in terms of the mobilization of memory.

Serra Hughes | Worlding Communication: Novel Communication Barriers in Global Science Fiction and Speculative Literature

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Serra Hughes | University of Amsterdam
The novel communication barrier, an innovation beyond the norms of empirical reality that obstructs mutual understanding, is identified in this thesis as a distinct literary trope across a transnational range of science fiction and speculative literature. Locating this mechanism across a diverse corpus of texts from the Cold War period to the present and from the United States to Britain, Canada, Nigeria, Poland, Spain and China, this PhD project is the first to untether these novelties from their local contexts to develop urgently needed clarity on communication in a world of deepening divides.