PhD Student Profiles

rbanerj5@uwo.ca

cdiezyn@uwo.ca

http://carolinediezyn.com/

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/)

Research Interests: Most scholarship on Jewish children’s literature and girlhood is primarily focused on the Holocaust, with some attention to late twentieth-century authors, like Judy Blume. As contemporary Jewish writers of children’s and young adult books advocate for stories showing the rich cultural diversity of the Jewish experience, my scholarship responds to this call to action by examining the persistence of the Jewish girl character. My research on Jewish literature is filling a need by exploring the coming-of-age novel and the construction of the Jewish girl in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written by women. It also examines how the Jewish girl protagonist survives the double alienation of subverting the traditional models of Jewish femininity and being ostracized as a woman and a Jew within the dominant male Christian culture.

General Areas of Interest: Women and Gender Studies, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Creative Writing, History, Girlhood Studies, Jewish Studies, and Religious Studies. 

mfishban@uwo.ca
CV

jhunt58@uwo.ca
CV

My research interests lie in the areas of Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Cultural Studies, Linguistics and urban/spatial studies. My MA dissertation was focused on assessing the status of the English language in modern Indian society, looking at how it functions as a medium of creative expression and shapes subjective realities. The focus of my doctoral research is the Postcolonial short story read in translation, specifically, the literary works of Bengali filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. It looks to expand scholarship on a traditionally under-researched area of Postcolonial and South Asian discourse, analysing the politics of language (and translation), literary narrative styles, the identity of the individual and the ways in which physical, emotional, and linguistic spaces are constructed. 

mjaisha@uwo.ca

My research focuses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, religion, and diaspora. In a broader context, I seek to investigate Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower and Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, along with their relevance to the contemporary biopolitical landscapes pertaining to gender and queer issues.

skhan844@uwo.ca

I am a current PhD student in the department. My dissertation is interdisciplinary and involves giving surveys to audiences at contemporary performances of Shakespeare. I am interested in how audiences perceive and understand race on the contemporary Shakespearean stage. 

I do all my best work with the help of my “research assistant”, my rescue dog Bluma.

alukawsk@uwo.ca

My research focuses on representations of reproductive justice in women's literature in the settler state of Canada/Northern Turtle Island. I am specifically interested in how writers of the 1970s respond to the 1969 decriminalization of abortion in Canada through their writing, as literature is a product of and contributes to the shaping of its time, either challenging or re-entrenching attitudes and political sentiments. As such, my work attends to the similarities and differences between settler women's and Indigenous women's experiences of reproductive (in)justice in Canada, as foregrounded in their writing, and includes a critique of settler colonialism, through feminist and Indigenous theory, as an apparatus of bodily/population control. I am grateful to have received an OGS award to support this research. Outside of academic, I enjoy hiking, writing poetry, and playing indie video games.

hmccarde@uwo.ca

My primary research interests are in early American literature, the transatlantic crossings of romance, and Black diasporic thought. My forthcoming dissertation “To Strengthen Hope: Romance and Black Pleasure in the Early Slave Narrative and Early Black Fiction” turns to romance as a literary mode of digression, the incredible, and the fictional to probe the interiority of early Black writers. I am interested in how Black writers reveal but never fully admit the reader into the privacy of inner life, where the fact of Black humanity and capability needs neither argumentation nor proof. The point of departure for the dissertation is that Black joy and pleasure in this quasi-private sense are key to understanding the complexity of early Black writers’ lives and the function of slave narratives and early Black fiction as deeply interconnected forms of truth-telling and imagination.

dmittera@uwo.ca
CV

amoha228@uwo.ca

sregier6@uwo.ca

I focus on cross-media depictions of natural space in early modern Britain. My research uses ecocritical and phenomenological tools to navigate the intersection of visual and verbal modes of representation in chorographies, descriptions, and surveys. I am also drawn to representations of the dynamic body in early modern and Romantic literature, particularly when contrasted with developing scientific discourses. Outside of academia, I am an award-winning author of poetry and short fiction.

mroone8@uwo.ca

mshari5@uwo.ca

ptsiokos@uwo.ca

jwals5@uwo.ca