PhD Student Profiles

UC = University College


	Rajarshi Banerjee M.Phil (University of Hyderabad), M.A. (University of Hyderabad) My research is invested in the relationship between Romanticism and Posthumanism. The study revolves around literary, philosophical, and scientific texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to explore what it means to be or become 'human', and what constitutes 'humanity' (also, by extension, the 'humanities').	UC 3401 rbanerj5@uwo.ca
	Kastoori Barua B.A. Hons. in English (Delhi University); M.A. English (Delhi University) My research studies the nexus between migration, belonging, and identity through various philosophical lenses of hospitality provided by Derrida, Kant, and Levinas. I am more broadly interested in investigating Foucault's concept of biopolitics and its repercussions in international borders and laws. Formerly an art-curator and critic, I'm generally interested in contemporary conceptual arts and the artistic representation of migrant crises.	UC 3401 kbarua2@uwo.ca

	Margarita Belova B.A. (Liberal Arts, Tel-Aviv University) 2015 M.A. (English Literature Tel-Aviv University), 2020 Primary area of research: Early Modern English drama and prose writing. Secondary focus: Literary Theory and Criticism. My Ph.D. thesis explores the genre of Revenge Tragedy within Early Modern Drama. Notably, the plays by such dramatists as Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, John Ford, and John Marston. Like many other writings, mine, too, investigates the dynamics of the plays and the genre from a slightly different angle, creating a fragmentary vision, which must enrich the existing critical mosaic of the revenge tragedy genre and shed light on many puzzling moments within the plays.	UC 3410 mbelova@uwo.ca

	Madison Bettle MA (Western), BA (Queen's) Victorian/19C. Secondary field: Postcolonial. I specialize in adventure fiction, masculinity, and the Indian Mutiny. My secondary interests include postcolonial ecocriticism.	mbettle@uwo.ca CV

	Sheetala Bhat MA (Manipal University, India) My research focuses on how performance both shapes and is shaped by postcolonial and settler colonial histories, through analyzing performative public assembly, including theatrical productions, political protests and social movements. In my dissertation, I study how cultural performances associated with Valentine’s Day reclaim love as a form of anti-colonial resistance in India and in relation to Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (specifically in Canada).	UC 3410 sbhat22@uwo.ca

	Caroline Diezyn MA, BA (Western) My research interests include American literature (1900-present), ecocriticism, time and temporality, sci-fi and speculative fiction, and gender and sexuality studies.	UC 3401 cdiezyn8@uwo.ca http://carolinediezyn.com/

	Anmol Dutta BA, MA Honors (University of Mumbai, India) Shastri Fellow 2019 I work in the areas of Cultural and Media Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Video OTT Cultures in South Asia. The focus of my doctoral research lies in examining Netflix India as a national space of cultural exchange: a contemporary tangible link to the homeland for the Indian diaspora in Canada. My project explores ramifications of the dialogue between culture, politics, and re-presentation with ‘protecting sensibilities’ in 2020s' India. As of 2021, I chair the Anti-Racism Committee and Equity Committee at Society of Graduate Students https://sogs.ca/committees/#Advocacy. And I work as Senior Editor for Re:Locations, a graduate student journal at the University of Toronto (https://relocationsjournal.sa.utoronto.ca/anmol-dutta/)	UC 3410 adutta24@uwo.ca

	Mahdiyeh Ezzatikarami BA (University of Tabriz, Iran), MA (Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Iran) For my MA project, I worked on the Orientalist Discourse of some selected memoirs of Iranian women residing in the West. My aim was to challenge the authenticity of the representations offered by the native informants. Considering the fact that some immigrant Muslim memoirists have used narratological techniques such as polyphony in order to give a more objective picture of Muslim women, I am interested in the ways that the potentials of the genre of memoir have aided Muslim women to not only overcome their fears but also to turn this genre to an effective tool to ameliorate other Muslim women’s lives through representations. Such authors have tried to represent a different attitude toward veiling, and have reintroduced it as a social element rather than a religious omen, capitalizing on the potentials of the genre of memoir for giving a more realistic representation of Muslim women. Research interests: Postcolonial theory, religious identity, memory studies, diaspora, Islamic feminism, Orientalism, Muslim narratives.	UC 3401 mezzatik@uwo.ca

	Jeremy Fairall MA (Windsor) My research examines the connections between space and queer identity in Young Adult Fiction, with a focus on the school story. More broadly, I am interested in Canadian Literature, Children’s and Young Adult Literatures, Queer Theory and Film Studies.	UC 1431 jfairall@uwo.ca

	Tanja Grubnic B.A. Hons English (Brock); M.A. Cultural Studies (McMaster) With an emphasis on women writers, my research examines social media, poetry, and the face of publishing in the age of globalization.	UC 3413 tgrubnic@uwo.ca

	Mark Haarmann B.A. (Toronto) B.Ed. (Toronto) M.Ed. (York) My research focusses on what comes after postmodernism, in particular metamodernism as it relates to contemporary Canadian and American literature and culture.	UC 3410 mhaarman@uwo.ca

	Ken Hunt Honours BA in English (University of Calgary), BA in History (University of Calgary), MA in English (Concordia University) My thesis investigates how poetry has responded to scientific ideas, discoveries, and events between the end of WWII and the present. I'm looking at how different movements in poetry have appropriated scientific terms, imagery, and concepts in distinctive ways in order to both critique and revere notable impacts that science has had on human society and culture since the mid-20th century.	UC 3405 jhunt58@uwo.ca CV

	Luke Jennings M.A., English (Western); B.A., English and Philosophy (Western) Early Modern Drama and Poetry, principally that of Shakespeare; The Geneva and King James Bible; Early Modern Theology and Theosophy. Personal Interests: Creative Writing (Epyllia and Verse Drama).	UC 3405 ljennin6@uwo.ca

	Sidra Khan M Phil in English (Lahore College for Women University), MA (Minhaj University) My primary research focus is what role nationality and cultural factors play in the sexual orientation of a person with South Asian constrains. I am particularly interested in the intersection between Queer theory and postcolonial theory.	UC 3410 skhan844@uwo.ca

	Hanji Lee MA (Toronto), BA (Toronto) Research interests: Victorian British imperialism, South Asian Postcolonial literature, Postcolonial nationalism.	UC 1431 hlee653@uwo.ca

	David Mitterauer Master of Arts in English (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada) Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Linguistics (Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria) My primary research interests are in nineteenth-century American literature and critical theory, particularly postcolonial theory. My dissertation project constitutes a postcolonial reading of American transatlantic novels set in Venice to understand how writers like W. D. Howells and Henry James launched a reverse cultural colonialism against Europe.	UC 3413 dmittera@uwo.ca CV

	Elijah Olusegun M.A, B.A (University of Lagos) My research interest focuses on the different forms of marginality (historical, economic, racial and sexual) through a theoretical intersection between psychoanalytic and postcolonial interpretations of the emergent and emerging discourses. Through a critical selection of writers across cultures, I intend to find a common thread in how change becomes a historical continuum.	UC 3413 eolusegu@uwo.ca

	Amala Poli MA (Manipal University, India) My research is situated in the health humanities, an interdisciplinary area that aims to de-hierarchize relationships among different disciplinary approaches to contemporary health and wellness discourses by recognizing contributions from various stakeholders and experience-centred accounts. My dissertation studies sleep paralysis, an uncanny sleep event set apart by vivid hallucinations, a twilight consciousness trapped between waking and sleeping, and a state of terror caused by the inability to move. What is peculiar about sleep paralysis as a recognized sleep disorder is its affinity with the supernatural. I hope to demonstrate how the relationship between science and literature emerges as mutually transformative in the study of sleep paralysis through paradigm literary instances of this event. I write on various topics in the health humanities for Synapsis, a health humanities journal founded in 2017 with a core team of editors from Columbia University. My book on the subject of life narratives as a form of experiential knowledge titled Writing the Self in Illness was published by Manipal Universal Press in 2019.	UC 3413 apoli@uwo.ca

	Jackie Reed University of Denver, Master of Arts, 2013; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Bachelor of Arts, 2005 Research: Temporality, Narratology, 20th & 21st Century British and Irish Literature, Women's Literature, Postmodernism. My dissertation looks at contemporary novels by women that employ non-linear narrative structures.	UC 3413 jreed48@uwo.ca CV

	Alexander Sallas M.A. English (McMaster); B.A. (hons) English & Cultural Studies (McMaster) (summa cum laude) My dissertation will suggest that texts featuring dei ex machina reveal a trace of the Kierkegaardian "world-historically justified." For our revelation as to the "universal"—which is to say, the reconciliation of humanity with its own essence—must come from an "extraterrestrial" force that will appear to us at present as a deus ex machina. I am also interested in Canadian literature, and, in 2020, I was named a Contributing Editor at the Literary Review of Canada.	UC 3401 asallas@uwo.ca

	Diana Samu-Visser MA (Western), BA (Calgary) My research concerns the cultural, socio-political, and ethical dimensions of technologies through which embodiment and archivization intersect, that is, the ways in which we literally and figuratively preserve the dead. Such technologies include cadaver plastination, postmortem photography, practices of deathcare, and material proxies for absent bodies. Other foundations and considerations include necropolitics, abjection, eroticism, death sentences, the ethics of necrography, the corpse in systems of circulation, and implicit/explicit depictions of necrophilia.	UC 1433 dsamuvis@uwo.ca https://chthonicboom.wordpress.com/

	Mohammad Sharifi MA, BA (University of Tehran) My research engages with the modern grotesque in fiction as a genre that emerges as the expression of schizophrenia and paranoia in American literature, although its scope is wider than that. I am interested in psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis, 20th century American fiction, comparative literature, and also Persian Literature.	UC 1433 mshari5@uwo.ca

	Nidhi Shrivastava MA (UMich), MA (Western), BA (U Connecticut) I am interested in the representations of rape and sexual violence in India from the Partition to the contemporary times, especially in lieu of the recent polemic cases that have taken place in India. Specifically, I want to address the themes of silence and honour and the ways in which these elements shape a middle class Indian woman's subjectivity through a close analysis of novels, films, and online media.	nshrivas@uwo.ca CV

	Lisa Templin MA (Ottawa), BEd (MSVU), BA (MSVU) My research interests include early modern drama, literature, and women writers. I am interested early modern preoccupations with women’s speech especially as it relates to sexuality, reputation, and suspicions of witchcraft.	ltemplin@uwo.ca

	Panteleimon Tsiokos M.A. English and American Studies (Aristotle Univeresity of Thessaloniki, Greece) BA. (Hons, cum laude) English Language and Literature (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) My research engages with issues of identity, immigration, assimilation, acculturation, violence and trauma as those are represented in ethnic, minority, folk, African American, and Indigenous literatures/oratures of North America.	UC 3405 ptsiokos@uwo.ca