Our PhD Students
Thomas Caffrey is a PhD student at the School of English, DCU. His research focusses on the roles of post-modernism and myth in formations of the self in the work of Haruki Murakami. Thomas is the recipient of a School of English doctoral research scholarship and is keenly interested in the works of Murakami, David Byrne, and David Lynch. He works at the intersection of the myth and the modern and is interested in representations of the monster in media.
He obtained his MA at Maynooth University in Literatures of Engagement in 2020. He previously obtained his BA at Dublin City University, studying English Literature and Communications Studies. His chief theoretical influences include Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Freeman, and Deleuze & Guattari.
Allison McBain Hudson is a part-time PhD candidate researching material culture and the role of objects in children’s literature, specifically the novels of L.M. Montgomery, best known for 1908’s Anne of Green Gables. Using a close reading of the author’s Emily trilogy, Allison is investigating the fictive roles of physical objects such as houses, books, and clothing in the narrative. Although material culture theory has generally been used in anthropology and archaeology, it has great potential as a lens through which to study children’s literature, providing a new perspective by focusing on fictional objects. Not just symbols, objects can also help to advance the narrative, develop and connect characters, create atmosphere, and provide historical and cultural context. This research follows the recent turn toward the material in the humanities, away from a focus on the purely discursive.
Originally from Alberta, Canada, Allison obtained a BA in English from the University of Calgary in 1995 and moved to Ireland in 1997. She completed DCU’s MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2019 with a focus on Montgomery’s unique Romanticism and “everyday magic.”
Jinan Ashraf is the recipient of the Laura Bassi Scholarship Summer 2021 for research on neglected literary traditions broadly construed and Ireland India Institute PhD Fellow at Dublin City University. Her doctoral study situates itself in the comparative colonial contexts of Irish and Indian Modernisms, focusing on James Joyce, the body, and the domestic novel. Her articles are published in Joyce Studies in Italy, the James Joyce Broadsheet, the Dublin James Joyce Journal, The Modernist Review, and English Teachers’ Accounts, a Routledge publication on English Studies in India (ed. Nandana Dutta).
Shreyashi Das is a PhD student at the School of English, Dublin City University under the supervision of Dr. Ellen Howley. She is the recipient of the School of English Doctoral Research Scholarship funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dublin City University.
Her doctoral study focuses on the convergence of the colonial project and environmental degradation in voices that emerge from both the “postcolonial” spaces and the Empire, in an attempt to render visibility to the narratives that are often invisibilized and silenced by the “metanarrative” of Race, Culture and Catastrophes.
Born in the city of Calcutta, India, Shreyashi completed her M.A in English from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 2024 and her B.A in English (Honours) from Amity University Kolkata in 2022, where she won a “Gold Medal” for her academic performance. Shreyashi’s research interests include Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism, Magic Realism and Diasporic Literatures.
Ashly Isac is a PhD student at the School of English at Dublin City University. Their academic background includes an MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Dublin City University and a BA in English Literature, Psychology, and Journalism at Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru. Their doctoral research involves exploring the intersections of bi-cultural identity and female adolescence in Indian American YA literature primarily through Tanuja Desai Hidier’s works. Ashly’s research interests include diasporic narratives in YA literature with a focus on South Asian diaspora, and contemporary depictions of coming-of-age in both literature and film. They are a member of III (Ireland India Institute). ISSCL (Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature), and YASA (Young Adult Studies Association).
Currently a funded Phd student at Dublin City University, Laëtitia Nebot-Deneuville is working on Anglo-American Literary Tourism in Northern Italy at the Beginning of the Twentieth-Century. Her corpus is composed of two American and two British novels in total: The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1908) by Frederick Rolfe, Arctic Summer (begun in 1911 and published unfinished in 1980) by E.M. Forster, Glimpses of the Moon (1922) by Edith Wharton, and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) by Ernest Hemingway. After simultaneously completing two Bachelor’s degrees, one in English Literature and Culture, and one in Italian Literature and Culture at Paris-Sorbonne University in 2018, Laëtitia Nebot-Deneuville undertook a Research Master’s in English Literature that she completed at Cambridge University in 2020. Her PhD project research emerged as a natural progression from her MA thesis, which she wrote on: “Travelling Between Oneself and the Other in A Room with a View by E.M. Forster”. Her interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, the representation of Italy in fiction, Edwardian literature and gender and queer writings.
I am under the supervision of Sharon Murphy and Michael Hinds (School of English). My thesis title is: Anglo-American Literary Tourism in Northern Italy at the Beginning of the Twentieth-Century.
Siba Ewaiwi is a full-time PhD student at Dublin City University. Her research focuses on the representation of female football protagonists in fictional writings from 1921 onwards. She is now a recipient of the School of English scholarship (2022-2023) under the supervision of Dr. Michael Hinds and Dr. Jennifer Mooney.
Angela Finn is a recipient of a DCU School of English research scholarship. She holds an MA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin.
Her PhD (by Artefact), “Realising Hybridities: Moving Beyond Genre and Form in Theory and Practice”, is concerned with multidisciplinary, hybrid literary works and visual texts (both individaul and collaborative). The creative component of her thesis will explore, through text and visual text, notions of place and memory, home and identity.
She won the 2022 John McGahern Award and some of her writing has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and The Moth magazine.
Mairéad Jordan is a second year PhD student at the School of English. She is a recipient of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Climate and Society’ Scholarship (2021-25). Her research is supervised by Dr. Keith O’Sullivan and Dr. Áine McGillicuddy and is titled ‘'A Glitch in Geological Time' - Naturecultures, Agency and Why Matter Matters in Multicultural Visual Narratives for Children and Young Adults’.
This research explores the presence of non-human agency and material-cultural interactions or ‘material narratives’ that work to blur the boundaries of the nature/culture dichotomy in a selection of multicultural visual narratives for children and young adults. It interrogates the effectiveness of the unique intermedial aestheticism of the multimodal text in the communication of these narratives. If matter and meaning constitute the fabric of our storied world, what complex narratives are communicated, how can the signs and meanings of storied matter communicate with the semiotics and aestheticism of these multimodal texts and what is the formative or transformative power of such stories and images?