Areas of Specialisation: Feminist/gender/queer theory, American literature, critical race theory, performance studies, film studies, aesthetics/ethics

My proposed dissertation, Posing Alternatives: Bodily Comportment and the Feminist Imagination, which is funded by a SSHRC CGS-D Award (2023-2026), investigates the role of gesture, posture, and pose in late 20th-century U.S. literature and culture, pushing beyond ideas of the body as a readable surface or sign and toward the relational, performative, and subversive potential of its comportment. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods from performance studies, film studies, art history, and political theory, I consider bodily comportment as a crucial site where feminists theorise sociopolitical transformation, as well as a space where questions of interpretation, visuality, and opacity push against conventional methods and ethics of reading. Authors and artists currently under consideration include Alice Munro, Ana Mendieta, Lorna Simpson, Julie Dash, Marilynne Robinson, Martha Rosler, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara.