Kyra F. Alberts | Leiden University
It has been argued that (Western) society is undergoing a paradigmatic shift, one that has been described by various scholars as one from postmodernism to post-postmodernism. A recurring theme of this shift is a sense of renewed social engagement with the world. In this thesis I will explore how this shift can be understood in terms of what Brian McHale calls a shift in the ‘dominant.’ Specifically, I propose to study the post-postmodern dominant as a hauntological dominant. To do so, I will develop a theoretical framework informed by Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’ and its recent theorizations in the context of what has been called the ‘spectral turn’ in the humanities and social sciences.

Yiming Wang | Maastricht University in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASOS)
My research is about online fan-fiction, Boys’ Love subculture and internet censorship and the title is “Fandom and participatory censorship: Boys’ Love fiction and globalized activities across the Great Firewall of China”.

Teun Joshua Brandt | University of Groningen
This interfaculty project aims to provide a better understanding of how we make sense of ourselves facing this paradigmatic shift in biology and the philosophy of biology. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s and Marco Caracciolo’s theories of form, it will extrapolate the key narratives of the biological and philosophical discussions on individuality and agency, and analyse how they are mirrored, depicted, transformed and questioned in contemporary speculative fiction.

Sasha Richman | University of Groningen, University of Strasbourg
This project proposes a comparative study of photography in the works of Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, American writer and photographer Wright Morris, and French writer Michel Tournier. The intermedial study aims to understand how photography, as a motif, a means, and a practice, informs the writers’ notions of realism and reality.

Tianran Zhang | Fluid Heterotopias: Gendered Bodies and Spaces in Modern British and Chinese Women’s Writing | University of Amsterdam | Supervisors: Dr. Ben Moore and Prof. Dr. Carrol Clarkson | 1 September 2021 — 1 September 2025.

This project focuses on gendered bodies and spaces in modern British and Chinese women’s writing and examines how they perform as sites that inspire female consciousness and accommodate alternative modernities. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Grosz’s theories on geography, space and the body, it analyzes how the narratives of interactions between gendered bodies and spaces shift across the 1900s to the 1960s, thereby revealing how female individuals are positioned in the grid of power relations and how they can transform spatial hierarchies and demonstrate alternatives to the dominant narratives of patriarchy, hierarchy, and colonialism.