AGHI/GSIS Network

• Sandro Eich

  

  Project working title: Whistleblowing Narratives

  Supervisor: Dr James Purdon (School of English)

  The project investigates the forms and functions of acts of whistleblowing in fiction and non-fiction writing between 1994 and 2023. Conceptualising whistleblowing as a form of storytelling, the project seeks to re-define whistleblowing beyond its organizational, legal and ethical discourses into a form of individual and collective meaning-making. The research suggests that the textual life of a dissident act like whistleblowing can forcefully contribute to the re-formation of the relationship between the political state and its citizens in the twenty-first century.

• Nicola Simonetti

  

  Project Working Title: Towards a Neuroinclusive Theory of the Contemporary: Representing the Temporality and Aesthetics of the Contemporary in Ten Novels of Neurodiversity.

  Supervisors: Prof Margaret-Anne Hutton and Dr Katie Jones (School of Modern Languages)

  My project focuses on the intersections between literary studies, critical disability studies, and epistemologies of the contemporary. It moves from existing approaches to the contemporary as a periodising and / or aesthetic category to discuss whether these approaches can be rethought in such a way as to reflect certain neurodivergent temporal and aesthetic experiences. At the same time, it asks how the contemporary can contribute – via its fictionalisation – to imagining additional categories of crip time, identity, disability and representation.

• Eleni Giamarellou Bourmpouli

  

  Project Working Title: Divine Outcasts: The Furies' Lived Experience in Rituals and Emotions

  Supervisors: Dr Emma Buckley, Dr Jon Hesk and Dr Ralph Anderson (School of Classics)

  I study the Erinyes, or Furies, ancient goddesses of vengeance, to show that they experience life as outcasts in a society of other gods and mortals. Usually the goddesses are read as incarnations of human emotions, like anger, or symbols of concepts, like vengeance. I reorient that thinking to present the Furies as complex deities with supernatural powers, complicated social bonds, and a rich emotional life. This is done through a methodological toolkit of philosophy, ritual theory, and theory of emotion. All of these are adapted to ancient understandings of religion and emotion. Ultimately, this allows me to posit that the journeys and experiences of the Furies, narrated in literature, contain elements that would render them relatable 'divine characters' to ancient audiences.

• Florence Felsheim

  Project working title: tbc

  Supervisor: Dr Sian Lewis (School of Classics)

  My doctoral thesis combines Classical research with cognitive sciences into an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the sex trade in ancient Greece and Rome. As the sex trade was overwhelmingly based on slavery in these cultures, I utilise material from modern psychological research on trafficking and sexual trauma to retrace experiences related to PTSD in the ancient world, to shed light on the lived realities of marginalised demographics. By linking ancient sources, both literary and material, with modern research on sex trafficking, my project teases out parallels in terms of dissociation, coping mechanisms and psychological effects.

• Bethan Okroj-Williams

  Project Working title: 'You Are What You Eat': Food and Drink's Relation to Hierarchical Structures in Middle English Romances.

  Supervisor: Professor Margaret Connolly (School of English)

  My project takes an interdisciplinary approach, with one-third of each chapter studying historical, social, and cultural contexts, to study how Arthurian Middle English romances present food and drink’s ability to place consumers within hierarchical structures and enable consumers to subvert their hierarchical positions.