Past 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.

Héctor Muiños is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at DCU working under the supervision of Dr Darran McCann. His research explores how characters are created in historical fiction from both a creative and a theoretical perspective.

The creative component is a historical novel, My Name is John Tyndall, which, though based on the life of the eponymous Irish scientist, incorporates significant fictional innovations – the story follows an unnamed protagonist, a gifted, impoverished young autodidact with scientific aspirations who assumes Tyndall’s identity and goes on to become the pioneer physicist the public knows today.

The critical component is a dissertation analysing the relationship between historical figures and their fictional representations. It focuses on the Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light) by Hilary Mantel, and on her depiction of Henry VIII’s minister.

Héctor holds an MA in Creative Writing from DCU. His research is supported by DCU’s School of English.

Iuliia Ibragimova, a holder of the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship, studies the sentient spaceship trope in popular culture. Her research covers Science Fiction (SF) literature, film, and TV Series, featuring the trope, from 1941 to 2020. The sentient spaceship, a hybrid, merging the human, the non-human, including alien, animal, insect, and the machinic, functions as an agential being. Due to the hybridity and agential potential, the evolution of the trope reflects changing socio-cultural attitudes and philosophical approaches to the interaction of the human, technology, environment, and non-human animal species within the indicated period. Posthumanism, providing the theoretical toolkit for the analysis, critiques the Humanist ideal of “Man” and challenges human exceptionalism, relying on which the dissertation considers how the sentient spaceship trope contemplates the place of the human in the world.

 Iuliia obtained MA degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature from University College Dublin in 2019, and a Specialist degree in Interpreting and Translation, majoring in English and German languages from Astrakhan State University (Russia) in 2009. In 2009-2018 she worked as a staff translator and interpreter in Astrakhan State University and taught courses for BA and MA students majoring in Translation, Interpreting and English.

Adel Cheong is a PhD candidate at the School of English, DCU. Her project is centered on the formal and thematic concerns of experimental twenty-first century fiction, particularly the work of writers such as Ali Smith, Mike McCormack, John Banville, Deirdre Madden, and Max Porter. Her project looks into how the deployment of ekphrasis acts as a self-conscious narrative technique that stops short of destabilising the ontological statuses of these fictive worlds in ways that are typical to postmodern fiction, even if it underlines the linguistic nature of artistic description in these novels. By paying attention to how these works straddle the boundaries between realist and non-realist narrative conventions, literary genres, and art forms, her project suggests that what underpins their thematic and formal characteristics is a self-conscious inquiry into why we read or how we read, as part of a broader meditation on why ‘art matters’. The affective dimensions of the encounter with art are further explored in relation to how the polyphony of voices and conversations between characters engender dialogue between the work and reader. In this, her thesis examines what is termed the dialogic aspects of these novels, and how it hinges on the active participation of the reader from both cognitive and affective standpoints.

Zornitsa Lachezarova is a PhD student at the School of English, DCU. Her academic interests include poetry and literature. She is in the fourth year of her PhD studies. Her research is focused on the comparative analysis of Irish and Bulgarian poetry. One of the key aspects of her work is her creative practice of poetry translation and its contribution to analysis. Zornitsa has seven awards for poetry translation. Her PhD thesis explores Irish and Bulgarian poetry within a post-independence context, approaching the historical aspects as a common background for personal poetic experience. The poems are interpreted through the lens of natural imagery, which emphasises a universality residing within the local. The thesis considers the various types of poetic expression of the historical period with a view to how they challenge canonical narratives and construct their own realities. The analysis also focuses on close reading of the poems and their use of language within the literary context of reassessing the urban and the rural and their interaction with the worldview and personal philosophy of the poets.