Meet Our Research Students

Supervisor(s): Prof. Stephen M. Hart (principal), Prof. Peter Swaab and Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (subsidiary)

In his article ‘Coleridge’s Daoism?’ (Wordsworth Circle 2020), Chris Murray traces the historical evidence of Coleridge’s reading on Daoism. When he was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, in June 1793, Coleridge borrowed the second edition of A Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732). According to the library register account, Coleridge was the first person to borrow this edition, and after him, no one else withdrew this book for a decade afterward. This book contains an English translation of An Account of the Empire of China (1676), including sections on Daoism written by the Spanish Dominican, Domingo Fernández Navarrete (1618 – 1689). Navarrete’s missionary work remained the only serious treatment of Daoism in Europe until 1823, when Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat published a French translation of five chapters from Daodejing. My research is a further study on both conceptual affinities and historical convergence between British Romanticism and Daoism.

Based on philosophical and literary texts as well as archival materials, I investigate, for example, the philosophical affinities between Coleridge’s ‘dynamic polarity’ in his Theory of Life (1816) and Daoist cosmology; as well as the possible historical convergence between Daoism and Romanticism via Schelling and Thomas Manning, who was a close friend of Charles Lamb, and had obtained first-hand knowledge of Chinese culture during his stay in China between 1807 – 1817. This comparative study can contribute to a wider rethinking of Sinological influence on the Romantic Circle, and it also highlights the broader complexity of cultural exchange between Georgian Britain and China at the dawn of the Opium War.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Patrick Bray (principal) and Dr. Leah Sidi (subsidiary)  

My research focuses on fatness in anglophone and francophone fiction, weaving together existing scholarship on the history of the novel form and the history of fatness and anti-fat bias. This will be one of very few literary studies of fatness to meaningfully engage historical, sociological, scientific, and art historical studies of fatness.  

One part of my research will develop a theory of the obscurity of fat characters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, building on previous work in queer and affect studies. This research will stem from close readings of fat characters in key texts, with particular attention paid to the ways that texts leverage certain affects to create the sense that fat characters lie outside prose fiction’s representational capability. In considering the flatness or sheer unintelligibility of certain fat characters, my research will present an opportunity to extend and refine previous thinking on disability, abjection, and affect as they intersect in literature. 

The other part of my research will seek to understand how the parallel developments of anti-fat bias and the novel form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in fat characters’ obscurity in later novels. My readings of British and French novels of the period will be informed by existing historical research, with particular attention paid to racial and scientific discourses on fatness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will examine how evolving literary, medical, economic, and philosophic discourses on the body and the individual to create the figure of the fat person as the perfect anti-novelistic subject—a being governed by type rather than individual circumstance or will. In reading novels from the period, I will chart the relationship between body size and the degree to which a character is presented as an individual, or as socially or naturally determined.  

My readings of fatness in British and French novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will also draw from previous scholarship on interiority in novels. By comparing the use of free indirect style in portrayals of fat and thin characters in nineteenth-century novels, I will look for stylistic antecedents of the contemporary novel’s reluctance to imagine fat characters’ interiority.  

My work advances literary studies by bringing together several strands of literary and social scientific inquiry: novel history and theory, feminist and queer theory, disability studies, the history of race and empire, and the history of science. Studying fatness in prose fiction allows us to probe the limits of the vivid interiority and individuality often taken as a defining feature of the novel or short fiction. In doing so, my research will illuminate how social and scientific history and norms shape imagination itself, as traceable in literature.   

Supervisor(s): Dr Cristina Massaccesi (principal) and Dr Helga Lúthersdottir (subsidiary)

My research focuses on the abject and the monstrous as represented in the fictive traditions of Iceland and Japan. I am especially interested in abject or monstrous characterisations of ‘foreignness’, criminality, gender and kinship in the cultural products of these externally exoticised island nations. In examining such characterisations contextually and from an intersecting psychoanalytic, nissological and monster theory-based perspective, I aim to contribute to existing understanding of the semiotic functions performed by the monstrous and the abject in human storytelling.

Supervisor(s): Prof Paul Gilroy (principal) and Dr Christine Yao (subsidiary)

This project will explore Jazz and The Blues in the work of Gayl Jones, seeking to discern precisely how Jones translates or transcribes musical techniques into literary ones and renders her written texts distinctly oral. My central research enquiry is to decipher the aesthetic and political purposes Jones' musical techniques serve. In answering this, I will explore the way in which they can facilitate psychological recovery from trauma, assert individual, national and racial identity and absorb and confront the enduring legacy of slavery in modern America. This study seeks to redress an imbalance by attending to the work of a much neglected author and taking account of her entire oeuvre, including her later novels and poetry collections that have received startlingly little attention. In considering Jones' musical techniques, this project will acknowledge and investigate Jones' innovation and experimental formal skill that has been submitted by critical attention, often hostile to her work's thematic content. Timely with the recent republication of some of Jones' novels, the project hopes to amplify a significantly aural, but often over-looked voice.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (principal) and Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (subsidiary)

My research is an original comparative study of crime fiction in Japan and Argentina, from the mid-nineteenth- until the early-twentieth-century. This study will reframe our understanding of world literature and reveal surprising parallels in global responses to European modernity. Crime fiction’s popularity, at a time of growing international networks, is an essential case study for literature’s role in the spread and reception of cultural ideas. Despite their geographic separation, both Japan and Argentina were involved in nation-building projects modelled on European notions of modernity. Yet contrary to Eurocentric scholarship to date, Japan and Argentina were not passive recipients of European storytelling; building upon local traditions, their innovative literary developments challenge our assumptions about cultural influence and the nature of authority, both narrative and political.  

My project draws upon literary, media, legal and criminological sources to examine the movement of ideas surrounding crime and transgression. In doing so, it will re-evaluate the roles of translation and adaptation, together with the foundation of modern newspaper cultures and law enforcement structures. Working with primary and secondary texts in Spanish, Japanese, French and English, it will spark interdisciplinary conversations between hitherto separate scholarship in Latin America and Japan Studies, whilst also reaching beyond academia.

Supervisor(s): Dr James Kneale (principal) and Dr Joana Jacob Ramalho (subsidiary)

My thesis examines the representations of literary cityscapes and waterscapes in the late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century Neo-Victorian fiction, with special emphasises on their spatio-temporal structures and features. To contribute to knowledge, I aim to demonstrate the value of reading these spatialised texts through ecocritical, postcolonial and cultural theories, arguing that an examination of time and space is central to our interpretation of “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1989).

Bringing together literary studies, geocriticism, and urban studies, my quest is to answer: Why space, or spatial factors are important in analysing a text? Can the setting of a text, or a physical/geographical place be a text? What transgressive spaces and places does Neo-Victorianism offer to challenge our preconceived notions of place and space? How do Neo-Victorian texts form or investigate the spatial configurations of Victorian as well as contemporary cities? What interesting relationship do these Neo-Victorian texts bring time and space into? These Neo-Victorian texts portray liminal spaces, including dockside slums, opium dens, and underground rivers and sewers depicted in Neo-Victorian fiction set in London.  Highlighting these marginal but transgressive places, it will uncover the complex tensions between imperial anxieties, marginal urban topographies, class inequality, and discourses of contagion.

This will be achieved through an examination of London cityscapes and waterscapes in Neo-Victorian fiction by authors such as Iain Sinclair, A.S. Byatt, Matthew Kneale, Clare Clark and Dan Simmons. / Since space and place are the key concepts that I will define through a spatially inflected reading of Neo-Victorian fiction and dialogue with scholarship in spatial literary studies, the idea of travel is central to my enquiry. This is because travelling has both spatial and temporal aspects in its nature. In each chapter I will address different versions of it, ranging from journeys through geographical, social or physical places to imaginative, metaphorical journeys. I hope to argue that through writing, reading, and interpreting Neo-Victorian fiction, our relationship with the past, and with the process of writing history, is spatial.

Supervisor(s): Dr James Kneale (principal), Dr Lara Choksey (subsidiary) and Dr Leah Sidi (subsidiary)

My thesis focuses on contemporary pandemic narratives in American novels since the 1980s, examining the roles spaces have played in connecting personal experiences to public crises. My discussion sketches out the historical evolution of pandemic narratives at the turn when literary representations of the HIV/AIDS, pandemic apocalypse, and COVID-19 proliferated. The historical and thematic reading of the pandemic narratives has informed the opportunity to establish dialogues between American novelists’ spatial imaginations and cultural geographical discourses. In this sense, I propose a model of geographical reading to illustrate the power of spaces that radiate from the centre of the fictional texts and literary history to broader contexts, including epidemiology, urban studies, and postmodern geography. My central interest is in the conceptualization of and division between “inside” and “outside,” something that relations between the private and public derive from and go beyond. My thesis provides a critical intervention in literary-historical scholarship and spatial medical humanities by foregrounding the phenomenology of pandemic survival in contemporary American novels.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Dr Annie Ring (subsidiary)

My thesis is an investigation into the epistemological and phenomenological process of site-specific media installations: artistic experiments that comprise light particles and sound waves, site-specific media installations are catalytic and reactionary to their surrounding spatial orders. They illuminate the potential to opening new, alternative spaces in-between situated places, wherein new kinds of analytics may be realised and employed within the wounded social spacings of the Anthropocene.

Through tracing the affective operations shared between the artworks and their sites, my research aims to contribute to theorisations that explore lived spaces of the human and nonhuman, in an attempt to tend to their precarious realities as entangled existences, offering imaginative ways of coexistence in our shared world. In particular, I explore the transitory moments in which site-specific media installations are able to suspect, neutralise, and invert the familiar textures of space, facilitating surprising forms of unexpected ties between different life forms across multiple spatial and temporal planes.

Revisiting Michel Foucault’s 1967 notion of the heterotopia, my thesis shines light on the installations’ ability to create alternative emplacements wherein different forms of life may persevere in an environment that is perceived as othering to those ways of being. By disrupting the flow or passage of linear space and time, heterotopias illuminate transitional spaces where all forms of life are challenged to assimilate diversity, wherein entanglements of material and immaterial elements may offer a (re)mapping of the phenomenology of place. I posit that the spaces animated by site-specific media installations make excellent examples of Foucault’s conception of the heterotopia, and moreover couple the operations of play through their performative qualities.

Supervisor(s): Dr Peter Zusi (principal), Dr Elija Taiwo (subsidiary) and Gary Stevens (subsidiary)

My thesis is an exploration of the nature of embodiment and abstraction and how these enable artistic form. Abstracting is a key trait of human behaviour. By definition abstraction is a conceptual process, or the outcome of such a process. Abstract concepts (such as “fun’, unlike concrete ones such as “dog”) do not have a bounded or physical, identifiable object or referent. Neither are they physically practicable. Embodiment, on the other hand, is a bringing into or presentation in or through a tangible or visible form. According to Reinboth and Farkas, embodiment refers to the derivation of meaning from the apparatus, faculties and states of the [physical] body of the agent.   Given this distinction, abstraction and embodiment have historically been regarded as largely uncorrelated, and interrogated separately.

In recent years however, the debate and approach has shifted, to one in support of an embodied approach to understanding abstraction. This change has come primarily from within cognitive sciences, reflecting the increased interest in the field in ‘situated action’, that looks to solve problems not through how humans think but to how they act within their environments. As a physical artist I am creatively and intellectually interested in this paradox. Abstraction and embodiment are both fundamental to the way I make work. In my research I will work through my medium and re-evaluate these ideas within my process, in the context of this developing debate.

In doing so I hope to shed some light on the co-presence and -operation of abstraction and embodiment from a practitioner’s perspective, that may be of interest to other embodied practitioners and artists. I also hope to open up a discussion about our relationship to space and form and draw attention to how we listen to, observe and notice through conscious embodied awareness and encounter, and how these encounters might be rendered in poetic form. I am interested too in the phenomenon or question of re-cognising, or re-grounding the act of abstracting into conscious relationship with (awareness of) our bodies. As well as allowing us to better know (and potentially be) ourselves, such an embodied awareness of our co-existing capacities to embody and abstract may give us the edge over, or a potential intelligence advantage in regard to how we manage, develop, interface and control AI (which, as yet, has no biological body.)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisele-edwards-49979434/

Supervisor(s): Prof. Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Professor Mererid Puw Davies (subsidiary)

My doctoral research is concerned with animal studies and animal representation, specifically it aims to explore the representation of anthropomorphised animals in certain European and anglophone texts. I will use the depiction of anthropomorphised animals in various fables and nineteenth century satirical texts as a jumping-off point to consider the history of this trope.  Crucially, I am interested in the question of whether we can observe a notable shift away from anthropocentrism and toward a new ecocritical awareness in these more recent texts. Before the emergence of animal studies as a diverse and productive academic field, depictions of anthropomorphised animals, from fairy tales to animated Disney movies, have often been primarily associated with a younger audience, or characterised as sentimental, and inherently less profound than entirely human characters.  While numerous scholars active in the field of animal studies have been successful in elevating animals and our relationship with them to something worthy of study in a variety of contexts, the ecocritical potential of specifically anthropomorphised animals which blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human has thus far been relatively unexplored. I therefore believe that this project will form an important contribution to the field of academic animal studies by reframing both our understanding of anthropomorphised animals in literary texts, and, in doing so, examining what ecocritical perspectives emerge from, and are expressed by, this representation. 

Supervisor(s): Prof. Sonu Shamdasani (principal) and James Agar (subsidiary)

This research project is a cross-linguistic analysis of depression. It aims to critically examine the language used to represent depression, evaluating our collective understanding of mental health and illness. By first exploring the metaphorical constructions and biomedical discourses surrounding depression, we can challenge an often undifferentiated diagnostic identity. The study employs a comparative linguistic analysis across English, French, and German with a view to exploring how cultural and linguistic nuances shape conceptualisations of depression. In this sense, using specific films and literary works across these languages, this project seeks to trace the usage of particular linguistic features, such as metaphor, in representations of depression, and to explore the family network of concepts within these languages. Analysing the metaphorical resonances across these languages provides the opportunity to engage with our awareness differently and to acknowledge different ways of looking. For example, films such as, "Little Miss Sunshine", "De Rouille et d’os", provide an opportunity to unravel the metaphorical conventions employed in visual representations of depression.

Additionally, literary works like Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, and Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten are analysed to examine how text differently construes depression. While certain representations can be seen to uncritically absorb and replicate an essentially medicalised understanding of depression, other narratives subvert these conventions and offer new ways of understanding experience. The goal of this project is to evaluate the language they employ in representing depression and the broader consequences of these linguistic choices. By addressing gaps in research on the linguistic analysis of depression representations, this project offers insights into the multiplicity of conditions often collectively understood as depression. It emphasises the need for a nuanced, culturally sensitive approach to mental health discourse, fostering critical awareness beyond conventional biomedical definitions. Ultimately, this interdisciplinary study contributes valuable perspectives to healthcare professionals across different languages, and enriches discussions in psychoanalysis and psychiatry.

Supervisor(s): Dr Hans Demeyer (principal) and Dr Stefano Rossoni (subsidiary)

When asking “What is an individual life?”, author Daisy Hildyard (2017, 101) illuminates the challenge of narrating an individual life that is profoundly entangled with larger social and ecological phenomena. My research explores the extent to which 21st-century novels written in English, Italian and French negotiate individual life narratives with the massive scales disclosed by the Anthropocene, raising questions such as: To what extent do contemporary novels narrate individual lives while retaining larger scales of phenomena? What role do affects play in the negotiation between conflicting scales within the novels? Do individual and planetary scales mutually exclude each other? Can large-scale phenomena be represented through individual life stories, and if so, what narrative techniques do these texts employ?   In exploring these questions, my research argues that 21st-century novels engage with the dissemination of the Anthropocene not only through genre fiction, but also through an emphasis on affects, everyday practices, and formal experimentalism. My overarching research objective is to highlight how these novels reposition individual lives amidst planetary scales, offering new ways to engage, cope with, and react to the impending scenarios of individual irrelevance. In mapping and analysing this genre I call “everyday Anthropocene life narratives”, my project breaks new ground for the scholarship of the Anthropocene. It considers a broader range of texts beyond the overstudied corpus of genre fiction (sci-fi, dystopian, apocalyptic fiction), including several subgenres such as autofiction, memoir, and life-writing narratives, which have not been thoroughly explored within the field of the Anthropocene. It prioritises a focus on conflicting scales over an excessive emphasis on large scales, and it overcomes the Anglophone bias of existing research through the analysis of a multilingual corpus of novels. 

Gothic Things in the East and the West: Objects in Eighteenth-century Chinese and Victorian Gothic Literature.

Supervisor(s): Dr Joana Jacob Ramalho (principal) and Professor Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (subsidiary)

My project offers the first study of the close relationship between eighteenth-century Chinese Gothic and Victorian Gothic literature through an exploration of key objects. It suggests that translations of Chinese Gothic texts in the Victorian era influenced Victorian Gothic Literature and Sino-English literary exchanges more generally. Tracing a cultural history of specific objects, such as substances (opium) and household objects (porcelain) allows for an analysis of China-UK mercantile routes and permits new insights into the literary depictions of ‘problem objects’ that had a long and dramatic impact on society. There is an uncanny aspect to the circulation of objects and their re-contextualisation, making the Gothic a useful framework to assess the cultural-specific terror associated with objects. At heart a literary project, my research likewise draws on translation studies and cultural geography. Through a comparative study of geographically dissociate nodes on the network, Britain and China, the project maps Gothic’s diffusion between the European and East Asian literary fields. In doing so, it promotes interdisciplinary conversations between hitherto separate fields (Victorian Studies and Chinese Studies), contributes to Global Gothic debates, specifically the growing interest in East Asian Gothic, and aims to uncover historical prejudices about underrepresented racial, gender, and class groups.

Supervisor(s): Professor Catherine Keen (principal) and Professor Florian Mussgnug (subsidiary)

This is a comparative literary project concerning Dante’s Inferno and post-18th Century lyric poetry. Under a geological lens, this research will show how Inferno can be read as a landscape of the Anthropocene (the period in which humanity becomes a significant geological force on the planet) preceding the term’s coining. Within the Anthropocene, humanity plays a dual role as both agent and victim to climate alterations. Dante’s sinners mimic this as agent and victim to the geological underworld. Rock is revealed as a vital character of the poem. Housing sin and sanctity, it is victim to moral alterations and an agent of divine justice through meting physical punishment. Caught in a feedback loop, souls and stone are constantly at work upon each other, witnessing sin (through the human body) enact environmental change. Poetry succeeding the Industrial Revolution germinates a modern hellscape revisualised in urban landscapes, matching a decline in faith with environmental degradation. This project will read the poetry of William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, and T.S. Eliot alongside Dante’s Inferno, considering medieval and modern hellscapes under Anthropocene theories (dark ecology, deep time, environmental eschatology). Dante’s geology has been overlooked and a study alongside geological ‘deep time’ will bring the medieval and modern into parallel focus, a mutually illuminating vantage point for future cultures of the Anthropocene. I argue for the integral role of rock as a body to the incorporeal, sin as an agent of geological change, and Inferno as a key text in understanding theological geology of the modern age

Charis Horsley - Linkedin

Supervisor(s): Professor Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Dr. Lin Tzu-yu (subsidiary)

In Cormac McCarthy and Alai’s ecological writings, the depictions of ecological breakdown are often accompanied by the representation of the massacre of indigenous people. Conversely, the rise of natural forces coincides with the decline of colonial power. In their writings that anthropomorphize nature, the ecological system participates in societal production with human personalities, bearing witness through its body and identity to the enslaving reality of political sovereignty. To discuss the spatiotemporal apocalyptic space, Fredric Jameson (Jameson, 1991) and Amy Elias (Elias, 2001) make the points of ‘the end of history’ and ‘perpetual present,’ which illustrate that in late-capitalist culture, ‘the time becomes flattened, and the future becomes unimaginable.’ Therefore, literature creates a loop that mirrors apocalyptic dead-ends and metaphorical political landscapes.  This project explores whether natural landscapes possess their own affective and spatial functions within the context of East-West dialogue. It examines how affective landscapes in literature serve as a means to bridge the human and inhuman worlds, representing apocalyptic crises.

Supervisor(s): Dr Cristina Massaccesi (principal) and Dr Maria-Novella Mercuri (subsidiary)

My project will investigate the way first-wave feminist authors utilise the genre of utopia to subvert contemporary depictions of matriarchal societies based on the classical tradition of the Amazons in order to further the argument for women’s political advancement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using comparative methodology, I will compare and contrast the depictions of Amazons in my corpus of texts with those from antiquity, as well as examine how these representations of matriarchal societies deviate from contemporary scholarship on the subject. My project will examine how early feminist authors worked to lift the Amazons out of the confines of mythological prehistory, where they had been relegated by nineteenth-century readings, and bring them into modernity, attempting to reconcile the images of the ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ woman.

Literary Praxis in Contemporary Video Games: Rethinking Game Studies through Experimental Literature

Supervisor(s): Professor Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Professor Stephen Hart (subsidiary)

This research aims to explore the emergence and potential of literary praxis within contemporary video games, rethinking the experimental literary theories and practices of the 19th and 20th centuries as they apply or transmit through this emerging medium. The study seeks to address several core questions: Can a video game serve as a literary device that offers superior representation compared to other existing forms? Are there specific games that succeed in expressing complex and particular subtle literary contents that are difficult or rarely to convey through traditional media? What defines a video game as a literary work?  Focusing on a selection of notable literary video games that explore themes of politics, history, and philosophy, this research also engages with theoretical frameworks including Deleuze’s rhizomatic theory, Eco’s historiographical metafiction, existentialism, surrealism, and Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of fictional worlds. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the study aims to analyze how these games incorporate and challenge literary concepts.  Furthermore, this research emphasizes the significance of video games as a rising form of literary expression, extending their influence beyond mere entertainment or educational applications. By examining their societal and academic impacts, the study will argue for a broader recognition of video games as innovative sites of literary and cultural production.

 Interrogating Human-Non-Human Relations and Imagining Ecological Futures: A Comparative Study

Supervisors(s): Dr Emily Baker (principal) and Professor Jennifer Rushworth (subsidiary)

My cross-cultural research project investigates human-non-human relations, focusing on human interactions with animals in the Capitalocene. The Capitalocene is the current geological epoch that emphasises how colonialism, capitalism, and extractivism drive ecological crises. Drawing on Timothy Clark’s postcolonial ecocritical methodological approach, this comparative study charts the fluctuating identities of humans and animals across cultures. The multilingual corpus spans England, Austria, India, Bangladesh, Argentina, and Mexico. Using this corpus, the project examines how ecological crises, including climate change, impact humans as well as reptiles, marine mammals, and birds. The corpus includes texts from the 1960s to the 2020s. It explores shared experiences of humans and animals that foster a re-evaluation of identity formation and multispecies ethics. Ultimately, this project aims to understand the vital role of contemporary ecofiction in imagining potential ecological futures. 

Supervisor(s): Dr Xine Yao (principal) and Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi (subsidiary)

I work across queer history, scientific culture, and creative‑critical writing. My research explores how different forms of knowledge - from the embodied to the archival to the imaginative - shape how we approach and interpret the past. I’m particularly interested in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑ century materials, and in how uncertainty, gaps, and unknowing can open up new possibilities for academic and creative work. Before beginning my PhD, I studied Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford and completed an MA in English at UCL. My background spans scientific research, literary studies, and professional creative writing. I am currently a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar at UCL’s Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry and a fellow of the UCL–Yale collaboration Racisms and Colonialisms in the Long Durée.

pennygraceyoung.com 

Supervisor(s): Dr Robyn Adams (principal) and Dr Matthew Symonds (subsidiary)

Previous scholarship on the early modern study of Arabic has predominantly focused on the pioneering ‘Arabists’ of mainland Europe, whose success is measured in terms of books printed and institutional positions held. England lagged behind, only producing scholars of note in the seventeenth century, and little is known about engagement with the language in its earliest period of study. Through surveys of marginalia, manuscripts and formative library collections, my thesis will shed new light on the earliest period of Arabic studies in England, arguing that no history of the field is complete without an understanding of linguistic encounter and engagement at every level: from the ‘unlearned’ and enthusiastic dabblers, to overlooked experts and sought-after teachers.

After gaining a BA in Arabic & Islamic Studies from SOAS I spent almost a decade producing documentaries for the BBC and other major UK broadcasters. In 2018 I returned to academia to pursue my love of history, and UCL’s MA in Early Modern Studies introduced me to the world of manuscripts, archives and early printed books. In 2020 I co-founded Miscellany, an online community for ECR early modernists engaged with book history. From 2022-3 I was a research assistant on David Pearson’s Book Owners Online project. From April to October 2024 I will undertake a doctoral fellowship investigating the provenance of Arabic manuscripts in the collections of the National Trust and the British Library.

Ecocritical Cartographies: Water, Power and Resistance in Maps of Dutch Colonial Suriname, 1590–1795.

Supervisor(s): Professor Zoltan Biedermann (principal) and Professor Jerry Brotton (QMUL, subsidiary)

My Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship-funded research investigates the ways in which colonial maps reveal past human relationships with and understandings of their natural environments. I focus on pre-colonial and colonial Suriname, a Dutch Caribbean plantation colony (1667–1795), where water was central both to the physical shaping of the landscape and to the social hierarchies of colonial society. The Dutch, renowned for their hydraulic expertise, transformed Suriname into a carefully managed hydraulic landscape. By examining thirty previously unstudied maps, I explore what colonial cartography reveals about diverse experiences of water in this context.  I pay particular attention to how Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and enslaved and escaped Africans perceived, used, and negotiated water differently, and how these differences reinforced systems of power and resistance. Drawing on the field of ecocriticism, which examines cultural depictions of human-nature relationships, I am developing an ecocritical methodology for cartographic analysis to investigate the ideologies of nature embedded within the design of early modern maps. My work highlights how water functioned simultaneously as a mechanism of control and as a resource for resilience, while also addressing broader, urgent questions of environmental and social justice. 

Supervisor(s): Prof. Lee Grieveson (principal) and Prof. John Tomaney (subsidiary)

Cinema and the Nationalised Coal Industry explores how the National Coal Board (NCB) used media, principally cinema, to facilitate and mediate the management and operation of the British coal industry in the era of public ownership. It uncovers a vast, decade-spanning corpus, testament to the vigorous and enduring commitment of an elite state institution to the production and circulation of moving images. It examines the media produced by the NCB (latterly the British Coal Corporation) as well as the way it circulated in Britain and abroad. Cinema as a didactic and persuasive form of mass communication, used in theatrical and nontheatrical settings, and for a wide range of internal and external purposes, is an important part of this media history. Equally important are the broader histories with which NCB media intersects: the history of national energy supply (the transition from British coal to foreign oil and natural gas); and of British politics and economics (from a planned economy with industrial production at its core to the rise of neoliberalism, the free market, and the deindustrialisation of Britain). Cinema and the Nationalised Coal Industry investigates the relationship between cinema and the NCB for what it reveals about British energy history and the political economy of Britain in the mid-to-late twentieth century and, more specifically, the ways media was shaped and used to supplement the political and economic policies and practices of both an extractive industry and the state.

Supervisor(s): Lee Grieveson (principal) and Claire Thomson (subsidiary).

Electrification not only illuminated homes, it importantly re-shaped the domestic space. Technology companies, as major home appliance manufacturers, worked to modernise domesticity and transformed the kitchen into a modern technology-testing laboratory. My research focuses on how institutions such as corporations and government agencies shared in the capitalist revolution to transform the kitchen in the United States; with General Electric, Westinghouse and the Bureau of Home Economics coming to use media to shape peoples’ understanding of technology and everyday life. I examine useful media in the form of promotional, educational, and industrial films as well as television advertisements and explore how media were used to facilitate or supplement institutional directives from 1915 to 1959-bookended by the earliest filmic demonstration of home appliances in the Panama-Pacific Expositions and the celebration of the kitchen modernisation as key to the distinction between liberal capitalist and Soviet communism in the famous “Kitchen Debate” in 1959.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Lee Grieveson (principal) and Dr Luke de Noronha (subsidiary)

Accessible digital media and screening circuits have enabled activist filmmakers to document more intimate and grounded perspectives on migrant struggles and amplify their demands for better labour and living conditions. These shifting documentary visibilities also attest to concurrent developments of precarious migration taking place beyond the excessively mediatised scenes of crisis migration in Europe and the US. My research examines the rise in radical documentaries on migrant labour that emerged during this post-2015 context of precarious migrant hypervisibility and how they provide alternative optics to understanding the ways in which migration and border regimes have intensified. It looks at documentaries on Syrian migrants who wind up rebuilding post-war Lebanon; deportee labour in Tijuana’s growing call centre industry; “illegalised” sex workers and their demands for the autonomy to migrate and work in Europe and so on to understand how these regimes are set up to govern mobile subjects as racialised labour rather than their violent expulsion from the sovereign territories of a nation state.

Supervisor(s): Dr Jann Matlock (principal) and Prof. Jo Evans (subsidiary) 

My PhD project will focus on cinematic objects that no one has discussed in a systematic analytical way. I will delve into three categories of objects on-screen: the planar such as paintings, photographs, and maps; the spatial that are carriers of movements like automobiles, stairs, and bridges; and the triaxial that includes all the everyday objects in between. My research will base on the close analysis of film texts, combined with multidisciplinary methods, including theories of the space and the senses, theories of everyday life, and the new historicism as developed by Stephen Greenblatt and Roger Chartier.
   

Supervisor(s): Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka (Principal)

This project aims to provide a unique insight into the impact of documentary films. The uniqueness lies firstly in the study of impact on publics ideologically opposed to the specific message of a film. Secondly, it will combine the theories and methodologies of two disciplines that study the impact of film, namely political cinema scholarship and media and communications. Finally, the specific subject of study will be communities in rural Poland and their views on LGBT rights. Altogether, the investigation will produce a contextualised understanding of the changing nature of Polish socio-political landscape and shed light on the power of documentary films as tools of resistance on one hand and of fostering community understanding on the other.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Claire Thompson (principal), Dr Tom Cunliffe (subsidiary) and Dr Stefano Rossoni (subsidiary)

Ageing, as a multifaceted phenomenon, intersects biological, social, and cultural dimensions, exhibiting mutable and performative characteristics that complicate signification and identification processes. In Western academia, the gendering of age has become crucial, particularly concerning how older women are discursively constructed under the broad term “age.” Despite significant developments in ageing theories, there remains a conspicuous gap in the systematic analysis of ageing women in greater China, a region experiencing economic volatility and political turbulence alongside a growing older population. Hence, this research seeks to address this gap by focusing on the depiction of older women in Sinophone cinema, a cultural domain deeply interwoven with the ideologies of capitalism, post-socialism, and neoliberalism, all influenced by historical layers of colonialism and neo-colonialism. The research aims to investigate and interrogate the notion of “ageing” and demonstrate how the cinematic discourse manipulates the gendered ageing body, using it as a tool to implicate and signify the complexities of transcultural modernity and shifting identities.

Heading Westward: The Generic Engagement with American Masculinity Following the Great Recession in Breaking Bad and El Camino. 

Supervisor(s): Dr. Stefano Rossoni (principal)

Breaking Bad portrays American masculinity as it evolves from its establishment in the hegemonic practices of a capitalist economy struck down by 9/11, and metastasized by the 2008 recession. The thesis will be centered around the world of Breaking Bad as a case study, which includes its epilogue film El Camino, with a strong focus on a phenomenological reading of the post-2008 US masculinity depicted within this world. The 2008 economic crash altered, embalmed, and empowered hegemonic masculinity in American men within Breaking Bad and El Camino, Gilligan conveying this metamorphosis through the phenomenological film language of sentient perspective. By examining the specific viewpoints of the men that control and destroy the world around them, the world of Breaking Bad is holistic in its sympathetic as well as emotionally detached view of masculinity, which allows for viewer alignment. The formal language of both the shows and the film within the Breaking Bad universe invites alignment with its men. This thesis will prove how in the context of a post 2008 America, Breaking Bad had us perceptually align with men whose masculinities were tested, provoked, undermined, and eventually asserted through a Western genre lens. 

Supervisor(s): Professor Stephanie Bird (principal) and Professor Mererid Puw Davies (subsidiary)

The anonymous gaze is an unattributable, structural form of visual power that operates across culture, identity, gender, race, politics, and technology. Unlike traditional gazes anchored in a singular viewer or authority, it functions through institutional norms, cultural habits, and digital infrastructures—regulating individuals without a clearly identifiable source. This project explores how filmmakers resist this gaze across diverse cultural and historical contexts, using formal, narrative, and stylistic strategies to disrupt its mechanisms. Drawing on six case studies, this research examines how film engages with music, painting, language, and performance to reveal how subjectivity is made legible, governed, or erased under systems of impersonal control. Ultimately, it argues that contemporary world cinema exposes not only the pervasiveness of such mechanisms, but also how acts of refusal and resistance emerge within intimate, everyday dystopias.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Mairéad Hanrahan (principal), Dr Jane Gilbert (subsidiary)

My AHRC-funded research focuses on the notion of voice and how it is used by contemporary francophone women writers. My thesis attempts to look at women’s writing from a new angle, resonating with the values of contemporary feminist thought, and anchored in the postcolonial francophone world. The notion of feminine writing, since it was introduced by Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay The Laugh of Medusa, has kept a central position in the study of women’s writing. Affirming the existence of gender-marked writing, this notion is very much anchored in second-wave differentialist feminism and has not been consistently challenged by later strands of feminism, in which the question of women’s writing as a whole has often been overlooked. With the recent emergence of movements aimed at breaking the silence on sexist and sexual violence, the idea of speaking up seems to have reached the very heart of feminist thought ; as women’s voices are conquering public space, the posture of women writers deserves renewed attention. My thesis examines how contemporary theoretical redefinitions of voice, and especially the works of Adriana Cavarero, can enlighten literary works produced from a minoritarian position, and attempting to give an existence to under-represented people. The concept of voice allows me to examine the ethical dimension of such texts, and explore notions of flexibility, relationality, proximity, and uniqueness. My thesis is currently focused on works by Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig.

Supervisor(s): Professor Mairéad Hanrahan (principal) and Dr Leah Sidi (subsidiary)

My thesis will illuminate the life and posthumously published work of French avant-garde writer Colette Peignot, alias Laure (1903–1938). In critical readings of her poetic texts, I will draw on the medical humanities, psychoanalysis, trauma studies and feminist studies as to represent her enigmatic voice. Working on the basis that this voice is alienated from the self and from external reality, I will emphasise the poet's persistent ‘tubercular breath’ as a means of articulating her deconstructed and disidentified subject position.

Co-Supervisors: Richard Mole, Jennie Gamlin, Fiona Burns. 

During my undergraduate studies at UCL, with a year at Sciences Po, Paris, I followed an interdisciplinary course-load, focusing on Political Science, Philosophy and French. After teaching English in Madrid for a year, I commenced a Master's in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at Cambridge. Following this, I worked with the NHS Leadership Academy, before starting my PhD studies with UCL and Wellcome this September. 

My research, which lies at the intersection of Sociology, Anthropology, Epidemiology and Sexuality Studies, seeks to introduce a "temporal" dimension to epidemiological research on "sexual migrants" in the UK. A central assumption of this project is that sexual migrants – whether from the UK or abroad – traverse temporal, as well as spatial, boundaries, and that sexual wellbeing and risk cannot be holistically understood without taking these temporal migrations into account. Through ethnographic research in a London sexual health clinic, I seek to uncover the extent to which abrupt shifts between timelines, such as "coming out of the closet" or transitioning, contribute to sexual risk. This research will have several policy implications, including a potential recalibration of eligibility criteria for targeted risk reduction interventions and an identification of further training needs for sexual health staff working with "temporal migrants".

Supervisor(s): Dr Thibaut Raboin (principal), Dr Alex Hyde (subsidiary) and Dr Yuan He (subsidiary)

China’s economic growth has increased mobility among queer individuals, prompting many to move to Western LGBTQ-friendly countries. However, mobility does not necessarily resolve marriage pressures; in fact, numerous Chinese queers in Western countries actively seek cooperative marriages (contract heterosexual marriages between non-heterosexual women and men) performed in China to fulfil cultural/familial expectations. Despite the prevalence, research on such cross-border cooperative marriages upon returning home remains limited. Thus, this study examines how mobility and sexuality intersect in these transnational cooperative marriages, aiming to uncover the multifaceted factors behind, Chinese queers’ experiences in, and the facilitated/foreclosed new queer potentials of such marriages. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yingxin-zhang-582267217/

Belonging in the British Army: Investigating identity and the self through corporeality

Supervisor(s): Dr Alex Hyde (principal), Prof. Mark Hewitson (subsidiary) and Dr Maki Kimura (subsidiary)

My project seeks to explore how service personnel in the British Army experience belonging and embodiment in military service. It asks how personnel feel and experience belonging through their bodies across four broad thematic categories of analysis, comradeship and socialising, customs and formalities, experiences of inclusion, and changes to the body throughout service. These indicative themes help to focus my analysis of belonging on the bodily experiences of service personnel. The central research question guiding this project asks how the bodies of service personnel are attached to the institution they serve, how their bodies dwell within military spaces, and seeks to understand how service personnel experience embodiment and belonging across their careers.

Navigating Epistemic Injustice Through Queer Archival Currere: Creating Conditions for Queer Thriving with LGBTQ+ Youth.

Supervisor(s): Dr Rebecca Jennings (principal), Dr Emma Jones (subsidiary) and Dr Juliana Demartini Brito (subsidiary)

My research explores how LGBTQ+ youth might encounter and negotiate voice and agency whilst resisting epistemic injustice through collaborative engagement with archival processes. I begin from the premise that dominant structures of knowledge production actively limit the capacity of young LGBTQ+ people to be recognised as legitimate knowers, creating what I term a ‘double bind’ where their knowledge is dismissed both for their age and their queerness (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011). This epistemic marginalisation is particularly evident in archival contexts, where institutional logics shape whose stories get preserved and believed. Rather than treating archives as neutral repositories, this research approaches them as contested and political technologies of memory that often exclude or fragment queer and trans histories (Cook, 2013; Derrida, 1995; Friedrich, 2018). Yet archives also hold transformative potential - they can become sites where young people experience themselves as both subjects and creators of knowledge, moving beyond survival toward what Greteman (2018) calls queer thriving. My work develops queer archival currere as a non-linear method attending to how power shapes knowledge production. This framework integrates three domains: epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) and queer thriving (Greteman, 2018) that moves beyond survival narratives; queer archival practices privileging everyday affective traces over official documentation (Browne & Nash, 2010; Cvetkovich, 2003); and currere's temporal wandering through memory and experience (Pinar, 1994, 2012). Woven with queer pedagogical principles (Butler, 1990; Halberstam, 2011; Love, 2016), this approach enables young people to cultivate new forms of knowledge whilst remaining open to uncertainty. My research will employ a two-phase participatory design prioritising care and relational consent (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to create thriving conditions rather than institutional survival. Phase One interviews archivists/educators to map how epistemic injustice operates institutionally (Friedrich, 2018). Phase Two conducts collaborative workshops with LGBTQ+ youth using personal artefacts as prompts for temporal wandering without requiring coherent narratives. Workshops structure around currere (Pinar, 1994, 2012) whilst holding space for silence and refusal, drawing on queer and critical pedagogy (Butler, 1990; Love, 2016; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994) as affective encounters honouring both difficulty and possibility of speaking.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Jessica Ringrose (principal) and Dr. Sara Bragg (subsidiary)

With rising awareness of youth gender-based violence (GBV) and misogyny, and popular interest in ‘turning to boys’ and teaching ‘healthy masculinities’, there is a need to research the extent to which boys are engaging and/or disengaging from these gender justice and violence prevention efforts and discourses—and feminism, more generally. My research seeks to provide updated qualitative research on how secondary school boys are navigating the competing popular and school-level discourses surrounding masculinities and GBV in the UK. 

@Betsymilne

Queer Bodies, Borders, and Healthcare Access: Homonationalism, and the Medicalisation of Trans Identities in the UK’s National Health Narratives.

Supervisor(s): Professor Simon Lock (principal) and Dr Thibaut Raboin (subsidiary)

This project examines how the UK’s healthcare system marginalises queer and trans migrants by enforcing binary gender norms as a condition of access to care. Existing research highlights how healthcare acts as a site of state surveillance and discipline, yet limited attention has been paid to the ways in which homonationalist logics shape migrant health policies, particularly for trans and non-binary individuals. This research seeks to bridge this gap by analysing how the UK’s healthcare system constructs gendered and racialised inclusion/exclusion, influencing the medicalisation of trans and non-binary migrant identities.

Forgive us our trespasses: The Coloniality of Sexuality and the Political Subjectivities of Young Queer Catholic Men in Post-Conflict Ireland.

Supervisor(s): Dr Thibaut Raobin (principal) and Dr Alex Hyde (subsidiary) 

This research examines how the colonial legacies of British rule, Catholic theocracy, and Irish nationalism continue to shape the political subjectivities of young Queer Catholic men in post-conflict Ireland. While recent social reforms, such as marriage equality and abortion rights, signal progressive change, Irish national identity remains deeply bound to heteronormative and Catholic frameworks. Drawing on decolonial theory, intersectionality, and Queer methodologies, this study interrogates the contradictions of Irish anti-colonial nationalism, which has historically marginalised Queer experiences, whilst recently adopting select Queer rights to bolster a liberal, homonationalist image. Through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and (auto)ethnographic research with Queer Catholic men born after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, this project seek to uncover how these individuals navigate overlapping systems of oppression and belonging. By centring Queer political subjectivities, the study aims to expose the forms of violence sustained by national narratives, while also identifying possibilities for new solidarities within global struggles against coloniality, heteronormativity, and authoritarian nationalism.

Young Black Women from the Rocinha Favela: Dreams, Social Exclusion, and Issues of Gender and Race in Contemporary Brazil.

Supervisor(s): Dr Malu Gatto (principal) Dr Juliana Demartini Brito (subsidiary)

This research investigates how social exclusion shapes the aspirations and professional trajectories of young Black women from the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and participatory observation, the study analyses how intersecting dimensions of gender, race, and class influence the ways these women construct their dreams and navigate barriers to social mobility. By centering the voices of young Black women aged 18 to 21, the project reveals how structural inequalities, spatial segregation, and cultural narratives affect their opportunities and self-perceptions. The research not only contributes to academic debates on gendered and racialised inequalities in the Global South but also provides insights that may assist the Brazilian government in designing more effective public policies to support this population. Ultimately, it aims to expand understanding of social justice and inclusion through the lived experiences and aspirations of Brazil’s most underrepresented young women.

Between Agonism and Dialogism: Shaping Memory Narratives in German Society and Beyond through the Expellees.

Supervisor(s): Professor Mark Hewiston (principal) and Dr Egbert Klautke (subsidiary)

This project aims to examine the complex debates surrounding the opening of the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, and Reconciliation in Berlin and how the expulsion of 12–14 million Germans and ethnic Germans after World War II should be commemorated and represented. By examining the controversies and debates that emerged both within Germany and between Germany and its neighbouring states, the study sheds light on how conflicting narratives are negotiated. Ultimately, the project seeks to understand how these debates contribute to the shaping of a more inclusive and dialogic approach to historical memory, and how they inform contemporary discussions on national identity, transnational remembrance, and European reconciliation.

Supervisor(s): Prof James Wilson (principal) and Dr Jenevieve Mannell (subsidairy) 

There are strong indications of unmet mental health needs in traumatised refugees - torture being one such trauma. Yet, our current understanding of the psychological sequelae of trauma is epistemologically limited. As a result, some scholars and practitioners have developed moral injury as a recent concept in trauma discourse, with potential relevance to tortured refugees.

Moral injury, a concept for survivors’ responses to the transgression of their moral beliefs, seeks to address trauma’s lasting impacts. However, this concept has to date been solely based on Western military personnel, making its recent application in refugee research ethically and epistemically problematic. If moral injury is to serve the needs of traumatised refugees, a non- Eurocentric understanding of the concept is needed, its epistemic parameters grounded in lived experience.

The need for culturally appropriate notions in trauma discourse is also consistent with my clinical experience of working as a GP with traumatised refugees in the UK. That is why I hope that this project will contribute to a culturally sensitive approach to therapy for torture survivors. Since Iranians comprise the largest number of asylum seekers in the UK, with some having experienced torture, my study focuses on this cohort of trauma survivors. I first undertake a theoretical investigation of the concept of moral injury before conducting a phenomenological study to explore the impact of morally injurious events in Iranian torture survivors in the UK. This will be followed by focus groups with healthcare professionals and support workers to determine the clinical and policy implications of moral injury.

Supervisor(s): Professor James Wilson (principal) and Dr Leah Sidi (subsidiary)

My thesis explores how diagnosis is enacted in clinical practice, investigating how the ‘tensions between sources of knowledge and styles of knowing’ (Mol 2002) evinced by the participants in the clinical diagnostic process, create the ontological limits of diagnosis in primary care. I draw on medicalization theory, a mainstay of medical sociology, and reconceptualise medicalization as an epistemic practice – a way of producing, organizing and transmitting knowledge in the diagnostic process. I am particularly interested in how medicalization and demedicalization define the limits of clinical diagnosis by determining whether and how patients engage with primary care and whether clinicians admit patients into clinical practice. I argue there is a disconnect between the broad theoretical debates within the social and medical sciences and the praxis of diagnosis. For example, while there is theoretical agreement that more emphasis should be given to patients’ phenomenological experience of illness, how this is actual ‘done’ in medical practice remains unclear and often contested, particularly when the expected outcome of the diagnostic process still tends to be a disease label. Similarly, an increased understanding of the biopsychosocial aetiology of many diseases, while academically fruitful in disciplines ranging from biomedicine to medical anthropology, has proven messier in diagnostic practice. Selective foregrounding of the ‘bio’, the ‘psycho’ or the ‘social’ has been implicated in justifying neoliberal welfare reform at the macro level, to inappropriately denying the medicalized status of patients with Long COVID at the micro level. I suggest that it is in an exploration of the ‘mundane practices’ of diagnostic consultations in primary care the impact of these broad theoretical debates can best be understood.

Supervisor(s): Dr Lisa Sampson (principal) and Dr Rembrandt Duits, Warburg Institute (subsidiary)

The aim of my research is to analyze how aristocratic women in the first half of the sixteenth century employed the emblem as a means to express their emerging gendered identities. Currently my analysis focuses on possible patterns among the emblems associated with female and male adopters, as well as to explicate role hierarchies and interaction networks that structure target audiences. I study how women exploited the emblem’s inherent ambiguity to play with multivocal interpretations and to respond to their interlocutors’ reactions. In addition, I plan to investigate how women’s production and reception of emblems reflect broader societal changes in attitude about women’s roles, characters and abilities. 

Supervisor(s): Prof. Catherine Keen (principal) and Prof. Robert Mills (subsidiary)

Caitlín’s research focuses on the intersection of medieval religious devotion and queer historical studies, specifically examining how female mystics and religious in 13th- and 14th-century Italy engaged with Christ’s queer body as a point of identification and desire. This study aims to explore how these women’s spiritual experiences with a gender-ambiguous Christ challenge modern heteronormative and cisgender interpretations of medieval religiosity. Caitlín will investigate the works and vitae of various Italian religious women to trace the evolution of queer mystical expressions over time, particularly among laywomen such as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno. She will explore how these writings respond to developments in Italian literature, politics, and penitential movements, situating them within their historical context. This research seeks to shift the understanding of these queer expressions from exceptional instances to part of a broader devotional trend in medieval Italy.   After completing a BA in History and an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCL, Caitlín worked as a Library and Special Collections Assistant at New College, Oxford, and the Bodleian History Faculty Library. Caitlín has now returned to UCL to undertake her Wolfson-funded PhD at SELCS. 

Supervisor(s): Dr. Xine Yao (Principal) and Dr. Victoria Redclift (Subsidiary) 

This thesis revolves around a racial category at the peripheries of whiteness, tracing its ambivalent uses as both an accomplice and threat to white racial power. Rather than approach ‘Asianness’ in fixed ethnic, cultural or geographic terms, I explore the relationship between its forms and functions of in the US and Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. I engage methods from the humanities and social sciences to pursue two interrelated questions: (i) How has ‘Asianness’ been constructed, adapted and mobilised in the service of settler colonial and racial capitalist projects in these two contexts? And (ii) how is this racial formation (re)articulated in the anti-racist activism of Asians in Naarm/Melbourne and NYC today?  By examining the genealogies of ascendant ‘Asianness’ and unpacking its contemporary re-articulations, this thesis aims to chart the conceptual and material terrain of contemporary whiteness; map its emergent fault lines; and offers vital insight into how anti-racist activists might exploit them. 

Characterisations of post-racial ‘mixedness’ and economically potent ‘Asian-ness’ significantly shape Western thinking about the future of race. This two-part thesis argues that, where these categories converge, ‘Asian-white mixedness’ holds a vital stake in the growth or decline of white racial power. Section one analyses the cultural production of Asian-white mixedness to detail its entanglement in anti-Black and settler colonial racial projects. Section two presents a comparative ethnography of (mixed-race) Asian activists in Melbourne and NYC who refuse the solicitations of whiteness in favour of anti-racist coalition-building. Overall, this interdisciplinary, transnational and intersectional study explores how those made covertly complicit in white racial power can become active agents in its undoing.

How do public narratives, media reportage, and contemporary debates on reparations and restorative justice shape the lived experiences, political consciousness, and historical memory of the Black Diaspora in Britain and the Caribbean?

Supervisor(s): Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka (principal) and Professor Matthew J. Smith (subsidiary)

I contend that public narratives, media reportage, and debates on reparations and restorative justice act as critical arenas for political contestation, through which the Black Diaspora in Britain and the Caribbean develop and express political consciousness, mobilize around identity-based justice claims, and engage with or resist state and institutional responses to historical racial violence. By examining these discourses, the study reveals how global and local political processes intersect in shaping diasporic agency and demands for structural transformation.

Supervisor(s): Dr Haki Antonsson (principal) and Prof. Jane Hawkes (University of York) 

Tablet-weaving is a form of loom weaving in which a yarn warp is threaded through tablets, also known as cards. The tablets can be turned forwards and backwards, either as a full pack or each turned individually, with a weft yarn passed through the warp at each completed turn of the pack. In this way, the yarn warp becomes a textured band. From these twisted threads a sophisticated pattern or motif can emerge on the surface of the textile. My thesis analyses how human migration and the expansion of international trade networks influenced the way in which the motifs and techniques of tablet-weaving evolved within Scandinavia and Northern Europe during the Middle Ages. The elaborate tablet-woven textiles within the ninth-century Oseberg ship burial provide a framework for this study. In addition, the investigation of textiles from the British Museum, Kulturhistorisk museet in Norway, Nordiska museet in Sweden and more brings to light the significance of the textile fibres and weaving techniques which shaped the narrative history of tablet-weaving. Using fresh data collected from an array of international textual and archaeological sources, my thesis aims to provide a new perspective on the story of textile production and trade across Medieval Northern Europe.

Supervisor(s): Dr Alexander Samson (principal) and Dr Lisa Samson (subsidiary)

My AHRC-funded research explores the representation of queenship on the early modern Spanish stage, focusing specifically on the depiction of fictional queens in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century. Identity has long been acknowledged as the interaction between experience, allegiance, and community, constructed at the intersection of multiple ideological demands and social categorisations. Drawing on this understanding of the intrinsic multiplicity of identity, my research establishes a new intersectional framework through which the queen’s character and the crisis that her identity was undergoing as a result of tensions within Spanish imperial ideology can be understood. In so doing, it challenges existing critical typologies of female characters, and demonstrates how female roles cannot be neatly contained by static and one-dimensional categories of identity. By applying an intersectional lens to the study of the comedia generally, and to the figure of the queen specifically, my thesis identifies how playwrights variably utilise, manipulate, and invert interlocking systems of power in order to shape the creation of their characters.

Supervisor(s): Dr Martin Liebscher (principal) and Dr Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (subsidiary)

The specific aim of my doctoral research project is the reconstruction of the Brazilian reception of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's ideas – especially among avant-garde groups, such as the Brazilian second and third generation modernists in Rio de Janeiro, and the burgeoning counter culture in the 1960s and 1970s Ipanema. A particular focus is thereby on the dynamics of the cultural transfer, hence on international networks, intellectual mediators and gobetweens of the globalised 'World Republic of Letters', that helped these ideas to spread around the globe. My work can therefore be placed right at the edge of fields such as Intellectual History, German- and Brazilian Studies’.

Toward Symbiosis: Representing Animals and Human-Nonhuman Relations in Contemporary Latin American Literature.

Supervisor(s): Dr Emily Baker (principal) and Prof. Florian Mussgnug (subsidiary)

My AHRC-funded research explores the representation of animals and human-nonhuman relations in contemporary Latin American literature with a focus on comparing and contrasting the works in 1950s–80s with the ones in 2000s–10s. The consideration of animals and their entanglements with humans has been an ongoing subject of critical discussion for scholars from different academic backgrounds. Drawing from pivotal theories in critical animal studies, my research sets out as a comparative ecological study which analyses how the depictions of animals and interspecies relations between two periods vary as they reflect and respond to the dynamic social and political realities of their times. In this manner, this research brings a timely interdisciplinary contribution to the study of animal writing in the contemporary Latin American context as it rereads and reinterprets a series of fables, novels and short stories from a posthuman theoretical perspective, highlighting the differences and developments in portraying a close but ambiguous cross-species community. In recognising the innovative understanding of animals, humans and interspecies relationships provided by contemporary Latin American literature, this research sheds light on the power and significance of writing in demonstrating and encouraging an equal and symbiotic relationship between human and nonhuman species.

Combining Critical Discourse Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Natural Language Processing Approach to the Impact of Ideology on News Translation (A study of western English mainstream media on the evolving crisis of the US-China economic competitions in 2014 - 2020).

Supervisor(s): Dr Federico Federici (principal), Dr Christophe Declercq (subsidiary) and Dr Claire Yi-Yi Shih (subsidiary)

Translation and media play an essential role in our society, particularly in an era of sweeping globalisation trends and unprecedented advances in technology development. By their common nature, both are instruments of communication, their neutrality has always been in question since they are susceptible to the impact of human-related factors, especially ideology. Drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (CDA), along with Halliday's systemic functional grammar (SFG) and Martin and White's appraisal theory within the paradigm of CDA, my study attempts to examine the ideology concealed underneath news translation via a mixed research method approach- combining CDA, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Natural Language Processing approach.

Supervisor(s): Prof Federico Federici (principal) and Dr Vicent Montalt (subsidiary)

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) recognises access to health information and digital resources and technologies as a basic human right. Enjoying accessible and digital bilingual, as well as translated health resources is a fundamental human right, especially for vulnerable people such as elderly citizens, people with hearing or visual impairments, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. However, health information is always written in a way that is difficult for the layperson to understand, thus creating barriers for them to use and act.

My research aims to identify the linguistic, textual, and visual features which have an important impact on the accessibility and understandability of bilingual health-themed resources and explore the best practice model in health translation by integrating textual and visual information. In order to alleviate the cascading impact caused by inaccessible health information and improve the experience and satisfaction of users with the widest range of abilities, this research project will develop a user-oriented accessibility evaluation framework to enable more effective health education and the promotion of resources in multilingual, multicultural societies.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Kathryn Batchelor (principal) and Prof. Reinier Salverda (subsidiary)

This research responds to calls to decolonize institutions and curricula across Europe by making a case for research at the intersection of Translation Studies and Education Studies. Using the Netherlands and Indonesia as a case study, this research unfolds the potential for counter-narratives from Indonesian literature to de-center Europe in Dutch education through translation.

Supervisor(s): Dr Claire Shih (principal) and Dr Caiwen Wang (subsidiary)

Interpreting for a specialised assignment requires linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. Different from translators who can learn this knowledge while translating, interpreters have little time to do so and thus have to acquire it mainly by preparation. Among professional interpreters, there are some common preparation strategies like reading the documents sent by clients, searching online for background information, and building a glossary. But regarding the more specific questions about, for example, where to find the most relevant knowledge and how to make them available for interpreting, few detailed and thorough approaches have been provided. As a result, some trainee interpreters may find the preparation process confusing and do not know where to start. Collecting evidence about the behaviour of interpreters’ preparation could reveal some commonalities and idiosyncrasies of their practice. By comparing the behaviour of different interpreters with an eye on their interpreting quality, good practice may be found. However, while translation studies have seen researches on translator’s behaviour of web searching, there is little research done investigating the interpreters’ behaviour during preparation. Therefore, researching the process of interpreting preparation could help fill the gap and offer empirical evidence for interpreting preparation.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Jorge Díaz-Cintas (principal) and Prof. Agnieszka Szarkowska (subsidiary)

Huihuang's doctoral study sets out to work in the emerging and blooming field of audiovisual translation, with special emphasis on cognitive approaches to subtitling. The main aim is to explore empirically the impact that different subtitling display rates, under various linguistic conditions, can have on viewers' watching experience. 

Supervisor(s): Prof. Federico Federici (Principal) and Prof. David Alexander (Subsidiary)

The COVID-19 Pandemic highlighted the importance of information accessibility in appropriate formats. England's communication strategy throughout this pandemic demonstrated that the study group was an afterthought in their comminques, with inadequate communication methods utilised. This research aims to investigate these failings and areas in which communication must be improved, using guidance from the study group.

Supervisor(s): Dr Xiaochun Zhang (Principal) and Prof. Jorge Diaz-Cintas (Subsidiary) 

Video games have become a leading form of entertainment worldwide across different platforms and devices. However, people with diverse abilities often find themselves excluded from playing video games due to accessibility challenges. The blind and visually impaired persons (BVIPs) are likely to face significant obstacles due to the visual-centric nature of videogaming. My research focuses on game accessibility for visually impaired persons in mainland China and also explores accessibility features in video game design, especially for visually impaired people.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Kathryn Batchelor (principal) and Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (subsidiary)

Drawing on concepts, methods, and topics from book history, the thesis offers a material perspective for researching translation as a response to calls for the medial turn in translation studies. This study views translated books as physical objects rather than texts they contain and investigates different uses of translation in terms of materiality. The whole research is set in Shanghai during the Late Qing and the Early Republican period when China was undergoing radical transformations to embrace modernity. Translation played a crucial role at the social and cultural level as a remarkable driving force that massively introduced Western ideas and concepts to China. As the centre of printing and publishing across the country at that time, Shanghai witnessed great changes in print and book culture. Focusing on translated books published by the Commercial Press, then the largest modern publishing company, this research attempts to restore the life cycle of these translations as cultural commodities by exploring multiple agents and other elements involved in the whole process. In addition, the thesis also studies the copyright of translated books as another aspect of materiality. Generally speaking, translation is considered a derivative work, with its copyright owned by the original author. However, that period was unusual because the notion of copyright and relevant laws and regulations were still in their infancy. Translators tended to enjoy a high status while the copyright of original authors from the West was largely ignored. By introducing a material perspective from book history, the thesis, as a whole, attempts to formally enrich translation studies and further promote its interdisciplinary development.

Translation in Sino-Tanzania’s Decolonizing Imaginaries: A Historical Study of Swahili Translations of Chinese Books in the Socialist Era (1964-1979).

Supervisor(s): Professor Kathryn Batchelor (principal) and Dr. Ida Hadjivayanis (subsidiary)

This study offers a historical investigation into the Swahili translations of Chinese books during the socialist era, a time shaped by Afro-Asian solidarity, Cold War polemics, and shared socialist ideology between China and Tanzania. Although cooperation in economy, politics and diplomacy has been widely studied, the more nuanced cultural and ideological aspects—especially through the lens of translation—have received far less attention. It is argued that the vision of a decolonizing alliance between the two nations was never unified or stable, but rather fragile, contested, and shaped by changing historical conditions. This study examines how translations served as a shared platform for ideological exchange and mutual imagination between Chinese and Tanzanian actors within a transnational field, shaping and influencing emerging decolonizing visions. It explores the full trajectory of translation projects—from their initiation and production in China to their distribution and reception in Tanzania. By situating translation as a form of historical agency rather than merely a linguistic or cultural operation, this study can potentially offer a novel perspective and framework for understanding Sino-Tanzanian relationship and the global circulation of socialist values within the broader context of decolonization across the Global South.

Pragmatic Quality Assessment in Neural Machine Translation and Large Language Model-Based Translation

Supervisor(s): Professor Federico Federici (principal) and Dr Caiwen Wang (subsidiary)

This thesis systematically assesses and compares the quality of translations produced by Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing research has identified shortcomings in machine translation but has lacked a systematic framework for analysis. Building on contemporary theories of communication and cognition, this study proposes a new framework for translation quality assessment. Through a multi-method analysis combining qualitative and quantitative assessment as well as cognitive evidence, the research investigates how different translation technologies process and render meaning across diverse texts. The findings aim to reveal systematic patterns of strengths and weaknesses across systems and to provide a more comprehensive approach to translation quality evaluation. Ultimately, this work contributes both a theoretical model and practical insights for the development and assessment of translation technologies.

The Translation of Chinese Fantasy Danmei Web Novels: Reconsidering the Cultural Politics of Global Popular Literature

Supervisor(s): Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (principal) and Professor Kathryn Batchelor (subsidiary)

My research examines the translation and global circulation of Chinese fantasy "danmei 耽美" (Boys’ Love) web novels, focusing on how this popular yet ideologically marginalised genre is repositioned within English-language popular culture. It investigates how translation participates in and influences global cultural politics.  Combining approaches from translation studies, literary criticism, gender studies and digital media research, the project analyses both fan-based and commercially licensed translations through their textual and paratextual features. It explores the religious motifs and mythical imagery central to fantasy danmei fiction that undergo multiple semantic and cultural transformations through the interaction between the original and translated texts, shaped by influences from English and Japanese fantasy literature, as well as other digital media forms.  The study also examines how translators navigate the task of conveying the distinctive cultural worldviews of Chinese fantasy while meeting the expectations of global readers. It interprets the modern reimagining of religious and mythical imagery as a form of queer experimentation in contemporary Chinese popular culture, through which queerness in China and East Asia is reconfigured and gains new visibility.