Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

PGR & ECR NETWORK

This page provides detailed profiles of postgraduate and early career researchers to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaborative projects.

If you would like your profile to be added to this page, please send an email to [email protected] with your short bio (approx. 300 words), research topic, title (if applicable), a photograph (if you like) and any social media handles you would like to see included.

For author profiles please see our authors page.

Research Profiles

Giulia Baquè

Giulia Baquè earned her PhD at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, and Universität Heidelberg. She earned her Masters in Japanese Studies and Literary Theory from Universiteit Leiden in The Netherlands. Her dissertation focused on Japanese contemporary novels that challenge anthropocentric narratives and reposition the ‘human’ in a complex network of ontologies. Her main research interests include ecofictions and ecocriticism in Japan, posthumanism, animal studies, comparative and world literature.


Sophie Bravo

Sophie Bravo is an undergraduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, USA studying packaging engineering. Her focus is on improving current sustainable packaging and creating new solutions, decreasing packaging waste, and environmental activism. She is also interested in the intersection between sustainability and gender and the inadvertent responsibility of women to lead the sustainability movement.


Sritama Chatterjee

An alumnus of Presidency University and Jadavpur University, India, I am a third year PhD student at University of Pittsburgh, USA. I work at the intersections of Postcolonial Studies and Environmental Humanities with an emphasis on the Indian Ocean. My current research on the poetics and politics of water in the Global South takes on two key questions: How does ‘postcolonial Anthropocene” reframe the notion of critique? How is critique related to forms of world-making? I ruminate on these questions grounding my inquiry in archipelagoes and contemporary urban histories in South Asia and East Africa. My engagement with modes of critique in the arts and the different forms that it might take : archival research, fieldwork, “critical fabulation” animate my methodology and public scholarship. As a columnist of Inside Higher Ed and contributor for Environmental History Now, I have written on a diverse range of topics including pedagogy, being an international student in the US,  archives and water in place-based research.


Julia Ditter

Julia Ditter is a PhD candidate in English literature at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK). She holds an M.A. in British and North American Cultural Studies from the University of Freiburg (Germany). Her research interests include British, Irish and Scottish literatures, cultural studies, border studies, animal studies, mobility studies and ecocriticism. Her current project focuses on the different forms in which borders and the environment are articulated in Scottish literature from the nineteenth century onwards.

Dissertation Topic (in progress): Borders and Environment in the Scottish Literary Imagination (1800-)


Daniel Finch-Race

Daniel Finch-Race researches creative representations of environmental change in French and Italian culture since the mid-1800s. His doctoral work at the University of Cambridge focussed on ecocritical approaches to Charles Baudelaire’s urban poetry of 1857-61. Before joining the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari, he held teaching fellowships at the University of Southampton and Durham University, an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, and a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Bristol. His current project blends the environmental and medical humanities to address physical and emotional aspects of pollution in France and Italy around the time of the Industrial Revolution. 

Postdoctoral Research Topic: ‘Enviro-Medical Approaches to the Industrial Revolution in France and Italy’


Milo Harries

Milo Harries is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, writing on theatre and participation in the context of the climate crisis. Current research interests include: community theatre with/after Covid-19; local theatres, terrestriality and the Critical Zone; theatre ethics and aesthetics; theatre as denial; theatre for change; games and play. Milo is also an opera singer, holding an MPerf from the Royal College of Music, and most recently appearing in the role of Domenico in Silent City, part of Matera 2019.


Katherine Huber

Katherine (Kate) Huber is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Oregon (UO). Kate specializes in twentieth-century Irish and British literature and ecocriticism, with interests in transatlantic African and Caribbean anglophone and Dutch literature and postcolonial studies. Kate teaches environmentally themed composition and literature courses. She also co-facilitates the UO’s longstanding ecocritical reading group, Mesa Verde. Read more about Kate’s teaching, research, and public writing at katehuber.org.


Roslyn Irving

Roslyn Irving is a PhD candidate co-supervised by the University of Liverpool and XJTLU. Her research centres on Ann Radcliffe’s third novel, The Romance of the Forest and the author’s eighteenth-century socio-political environment.


Abdelhafid Jabri

Abdelhafid Jabri is a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Letters, Humanities and Arts at Mohammed First University, Oujda, Morocco. His research interests centre on moral and environmental philosophy in fiction but also on their applications in higher education. Jabri is also an emerging writer of flash poetry and fiction, a member of EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment), a reviewer for the journal of Ecohumanism, and a participant in the 2021 virtual exchange program between his university and the University of East Carolina. Some of his scholarly and creative works were published in Moroccan, British, and American journals.


Katharina Maria Kalinowski

Katharina Maria Kalinowski is a bilingual poet and EUmanities fellow at the Universities of Cologne and Kent. Her creative-critical PhD project focuses on ecopoetics, the Anthropocene, and expanded forms of translation. Her publications include Magma, Epizootics, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Dissertation Topic (in progress): Trans-lating Nature: An Investigation into the Multiplicity of Languages in Ecopoetry


Hannah Klaubert

Hannah Klaubert is a doctoral student based at Stockholm University and the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany. Hannah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam.


Her research focuses on fiction from the last three decades dealing with nuclear accidents and disasters. Through an (eco)narratological analysis of the aesthetic forms and strategies employed in literature and film, she aims to understand how the imperceptible threat of radiation and its impact on the human and non-human world are negotiated.


Benjamin Klein

Benjamin Klein holds an MPhil in Environmental Humanities from the University of Cape Town and an MA in English from the University of Leeds. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the English faculty at the University of Cambridge, where he is completing a dissertation on environmental justice in modern South African literature. His research interests lie in the intersections between environmental criticism and postcolonial thought, with a broad concern for literary engagements with the nonhuman world across varying historical, cultural and geographical contexts in the Global South. He has published ecocritical work in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and Oxford Research in English.

Dissertation Topic (in progress): South African Literature and Environmental Justice


Melina Lieb

Melina Lieb is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz/Germersheim, Germany. Her research focus is on 21st-century British Nature Writing, ecocriticism and ecopoetry. In her dissertation she considers the role of the “common” in this field of literature, including aspects such as the everyday, the ordinary and the familiar as well as the shared and the political. Melina also writes her own prose and poetry inspired by the natural world, both in English and German.


Elizabeth MacAfee

Elizabeth MacAfee is a PhD candidate in Society, Development and Planning at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Elizabeth has a master’s degree in International Environmental Studies from NMBU and a bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science from the University of Puget Sound. The topic of Elizabeth’s dissertation is drinking water quality governance and planning in Kaolack, Senegal. She is interested in the ethical aspects of drinking water quality governance and frames her thesis using concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. Elizabeth is also a member of a speculative fiction book club in her free time. She read all three books referenced in this post with the book club and the ideas presented here grew out of those discussions.


e-mail: [email protected]

Academia: Annemarie Mönch

Instagram: @phytopoets

Annemarie Mönch

Annemarie Mönch is a PhD candidate at the Chair of English Literature at the University of Erfurt, where she was awarded a dissertation scholarship. In her doctoral project, she focusses on queer and queering nature writing(s) in Algernon Blackwood’s (1869-1951) speculative fiction, particularly on the emergence of the vegetal within the narratives – articulated by sounds and smells – as sensually entangling human and nonhuman. She reads Blackwood’s texts as imagining possibilities of plant-human intimacies that not only overcome species borders but also dehumanise notions of love and desire. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Ecocriticism and Queer Theory, the EcoGothic and Feminist Theory.

Dissertation Topic (in progress): Nature’s Queer Articulations: Ecophilia in Algernon Blackwood’s Nature Writings

Supervisor: Kai Merten, Professor of English Literature, Chair of English Literary Studies, University of Erfurt


Lena Pfeifer

Lena Pfeifer is a PhD candidate at the department for American Studies and the Graduate School of the Humanities at Würzburg University. She holds an MA in English and American literature and culture with a minor in philosophy from Heidelberg University and a BA from the University of Siegen. During her studies, she spent one semester at University College Cork, Ireland, and was a short-term visiting researcher at King’s College, Cambridge. Lena’s research interests are rooted in the Environmental Humanities and include fictional and non-fictional environmental writing of the 20th and 21st centuries, narratives of the Anthropocene, political theory, and environmental ethics. With a number of other young researchers, she has recently co-edited a small volume with the title Literaturtheorie nach 2001 (Matthes & Seitz, 2020), in which she has co-authored texts on ‘environment,’ ‘form’, and ‘surface’ literary theory.

Dissertation topic (in progress): “The Ethics of ‘Nature’ and ‘Environment’ in the Discourse of the Anthropocene since the 1980s” (supervised by Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf)


e-mail: [email protected]

Instagram: @zteev.r

Facebook: s.rozzoni

Stefano Rozzoni

Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in “Transcultural Studies in Humanities” at the University of Bergamo, Italy, in cotutelle with Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where he is a member of the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies”, and an affiliate member of the European doctoral program PhdNet. He is also a member of the Research Group “Oikos. Ecology and the Study of Culture” at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gießen. His research interests focus on Ecocriticism, Posthuman Studies, English Modernism, Virginia Woolf, and pastoral poetry.

His dissertation project proposes an ecocritical reading of English Georgian pastoral poetry (1911-1926) for a critical reevaluation of this trend.


Debadrita Saha

Debadrita Saha (She/her) has completed her postgraduation in English Literature from Presidency University in Kolkata and works as a Teaching Assistant at Brainware University, Kolkata. Her field of interests include postcolonial studies, literatures in translation, critical race theory, caste and gender studies, ecofeminism, contemporary politics, art and cinema. At present, she researches at People’s Archive of Rural India, a multimedia journalistic platform that records and archives an authentic picture of non-urban India, and contributes to the library of non-canonical literature at Decoloniszing our bookshelves, a non-profit virtual organisation which aims to bring voices of socially marginalised literati to the fore.


Sonali Sharma

Sonali Sharma belongs to the hilly state of Uttarakhand in India. She is a postgraduate in environmental studies from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. She is an aspiring researcher, a published poet, and a writer. Her current research focuses on ecofeminism, organic farming, and environmental movements in India. She also expresses her views on environmental concerns in Down to Earth and Indian Policy Review. Apart from her writing and research interests, she has been actively engaged with grassroots organizations working for minority needs. You can reach her out on her Linkedin profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonali-sharma-msc-884b74143/


e-mail: [email protected]

Twitter: @Agnes_S_P

Agnes Strickland-Pajtok

Agnes Strickland-Pajtok is assistant professor at the Department of Film and Media Studies at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Hungary. Her main fields of interest include the analysis of gender in popular culture, ecofeminism, and intercultural studies – with emphasis on the representation of immigrants and minorities in various media and cultural products. In the 2021/22 academic year she is a visiting fellow at Oxford Brookes University, where she conducts research on the oeuvre of Baroness Emma Orczy.


Dorka Tamás

Dorka Tamás has submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Exeter, which explores the supernatural themes in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Her research interest includes literary representations of magic and witchcraft and the relationship between the natural environment and supernatural subthemes across literature and culture.


Rosanne van der Voet

Rosanne van der Voet is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield. She has a background in European Culture and Literature (BA University of Amsterdam) and Literature, Landscape and Environment (MA Bath Spa University). Among other things, she is interested in material ecocriticism and creative practice, representations of sea and coast in contemporary literature, and development of new writing styles in response to the environmental crisis.

Her PhD project explores what kinds of stories can make the environmental crisis of the oceans tangible, with a particular focus on the coast of South-Holland.


Paula Wieczorek

Paula Wieczorek (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów, Poland. Her particular fields of interest include posthumanism, ecocriticism, material feminism and contemporary North American literature. She is currently working on her book on speculative fiction of selected North American Indigenous writers. In her research, she examines the relationship between human and non-human as illustrated in contemporary American fiction. She is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).


Abigail Zajac

Abigail Zajac is an undergraduate at Missouri State University. She plans to pursue a graduate degree after she completes her bachelor’s degree in May 2024. She has presented at Missouri State’s 2023 Undergraduate Literary Conference and will be presenting at the Northeastern Popular Culture’s Association’s Fall Conference. She is most interested in exploring the ways patriarchy effects climate change and the intersection of literature and media.


e-mail: [email protected]

Academia.edu: Nikoleta Zampaki

Nikoleta Zampaki

Dr Nikoleta Zampaki is Post-doc Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She was Instructor at the Utah University in the U.S.A. Her disciplines are Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Digital Humanities, and Comparative Literature. She is editor and reviewer at many journals overseas, Associate and Managing Editor at the Journal of Ecohumanism, and current member of Education Team of NASA, V.I.N.E.-Glenn Research Center. She has also participated in many conferences and she is a multilingual student by working on English, French, Romanian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Maori, and Turkish. She is also co-editor with Professor Peggy Karpouzou of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Rowman & Littlefield, and “Environmental Humanities” at TPLondon based in the U.K.