Current PhD Research

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.

Jiang Ye | Cross-Cultural Writing: Chinese Fan Fiction on the English World | School of Asian Studies, The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies | Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Maghiel van Crevel | 01-10-2019 to 30-09-2023

My topic focus on Chinese fan fiction written by Chinese young female based on English source texts. It asks how this collective writing behaviour that crosses cultural borders in an unique way can realise Chinese young female’s subjectivities. In four case studies, I will focus on four different identifications in which the said subjectivities emerge through the authors’ agency. I will both close-read the texts and invoke the bigger picture of overarching tropes and media.

Rose Smith | University of Groningen
This dissertation aims to critically scrutinize how transnational knowledge bases create a hegemonic European Communist memory narrative in museums. It fills a conceptual and empirical gap in the field of memory studies. First, the concept of mnemonic hegemony, though has been used by various scholars in memory studies, has not yet been properly developed; thus, it opens up an analytic optic that specifically focuses on mnemonic power struggles for obtaining a special advantage or authority. Second, while there is a substantial amount of research on the European memory of Communism, the transnational network organizations of European memory, as well as the museums of Communism, there is no research that specifically deals with how museum members of the Platform for European Conscience narrate Communist past.