Supervisory Interest

Centering on my primary lines of research, I am open to supervising dissertations at the undergraduate, MA, and PhD levels. Specifically, I am looking for students who wish to explore and deepen their understanding of the following interconnected themes:

  1. Cultural and literary articulations of war and conflict
    • Continuities and discontinuities in the depiction of war across different historical periods
    • Censorship and propaganda: Manipulating narratives and shaping the collective imagination in times of conflict
    • Representational anxiety and linguistic inadequacy when attempting to capture the complexities and traumas of war
  2. The interplay between literature, culture and historiography
    • The blurring of fact and fiction: Cultural and literary narratives as historical documents
    • Intertextuality and cross-referencing: Literary conversations and connections
  3. Border Crossing Experiences in Narratives of Conflict
    • Physical, psychological, spatial and temporal border-crossings
    • Textual and aesthetic borders
    • The ethics of walls, boundaries, frontiers and borderlands
    • Cross‐border negotiation: Dominant vs. counter border stories
  4. War Refugees and Displaced Populations
    • Migration patterns in conflict: Displacement, exile and return
    • Engagement with host societies
    • Evolving perceptions of identity beyond the victim-perpetrator binary.
    • Postmemory and intergenerational memory: activism, suppression and silence
    • Psychological implications of displacement: Trauma, post-traumatic stress, coping mechanisms and recovery.
  5. Crafting Heroes, Villains and Victims
    • Continuities and discontinuities in the perception of heroism, villainy and victimhood: “Histories from below” vs. dominant narratives
    • The hero/victim/enemy tropes across different literary genres and media
  6. Gender Wars
    • Roles in the fray: Combatant and non-combatant perspectives
    • Echoes from the margins: Women writing about war and the feminist critique
    • Gendered Tropes and Archetypes: The stoic male warrior, the grieving mother and the enigmatic female spy
    • Violence Beyond Combat: Sexual violence in conflict zones
    • Gender dynamics in the post-war landscape.
  7. Juvenilia’s reflections on war trauma
    • Childhood in the Theater of War: First-hand witnesses, victims and child soldiers
    • Emotional landscapes: Trauma, fear, resilience and coping mechanisms
    • The legacy of childhood war trauma
  8. Mediated Memories: (Post) Memory, Melancholy and Nostalgia
    • Individual vs. collective memory
    • The place of nostalgia in post-conflict reconciliation, dialogue, and healing
      • Memory in the diaspora: Belonging, place and homeland nostalgia
      • Tangled memories: the romantisation of history
    • Echoes of Genocide, Violence and Trauma
      • First and second-hand narratives from genocide survivors
      • The perpetrator psyche
      • Patterns of representation, omission and distortion
      • Coping mechanisms and rituals of mourning