Current PhD Research

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.

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 | 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 | 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.