Doctoral Students at the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing are working on a range of fascinating and innovative topics.
Alex Hammond
The figure of the returning veteran and the influence of trauma and memory on narrative, from Vietnam to the War on Terror. My creative component explores the literary and social legacies of Vietnam, on soldiers’ narratives and public responses respectively. The critical examines the role of creative writing in veterans’ rehabilitation, and how creative writing teaching practices shape the way war stories and veterans’ narratives are presented.
Kostas Kaltas
I am writing a three-generation saga, tracing the lives of a Greek family from the 1944-49 civil war till the infamous 2015 referendum, which will also (hopefully) function as an investigation of three modes of historical fiction (the lyrical ‘realist’ World War II novel, the contemporary culture-fetishizing bildungsroman, and the self-conscious mode often referred to as historiographic metafiction). In case this wasn’t complicated enough, the novel should also function as a ghost story. My accompanying exegesis aims to prove I had not completely lost my mind when I submitted my proposal.
Alison Marmont
My project focuses on intersectional discrimination in France and in the novels of Linda Lê and Marie NDiaye, two contemporary French authors. With reference to Ahmed’s concept of ‘being-at-home’, I analyse how various spaces of belonging are constructed in France and in the texts and the impact of this on the embodied experiences of those deemed out-of-place because of their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age etc.Â
Joan McGavin
Joan McGavin is now a Ph.D candidate at the University of Southampton, after years as an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. She has published two collections of poems from Oversteps Books, curated and edited a collection for the initial Winchester Poetry Festival, and had her first big break in poetry as one of six featured poets in a Peterloo Poets anthology edited by Harry Chambers. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2012, and was Hampshire Poet 2014. She is a trustee of the Winchester Poetry Festival.
Joseph Owen
I am an English PhD student at the University of Southampton and Stephanie Jones supervises my project. My thesis focuses on the role of aesthetics in the work of German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt. I argue that sovereignty is a central concern of literary modernism and aim to bring modernist understandings of sovereignty into discussions of Schmitt’s thought. I am the postgraduate representative for the Centre of Modern and Contemporary Writing (CMCW).
Lian Patson
My research focusses on the figure of the stranger and digitalisation in contemporary fiction. I look to understand how representations of digital culture enables an understanding of how – and if – we might ethically claim to ‘know’, and know who, the stranger ‘is’. My research examines a variety of novels by those such as Chris Kraus, Dana Spiotta, Gary Schteyngart and Cory Doctorow to theorise how forms of relation, such as Donna Haraway’s notion of affinity, can illuminate new meaning on the constitution of subjects and strangers in the 21st century.