Thesis title: Beyond Authenticity: Narrative Form and Critical Feminist Engagement in Contemporary Women's Autofiction, 2010-2022
Supervisor: Professor Elleke Boehmer
Doctoral Research: My research examines the construction of narrative form in contemporary women's autofiction to consider what insights it might bring to existing debates on narrative theory, women's writing, and the core issues which tie contemporary female authorship to its narrativization. Women's autobiographies have previously been studied as testimony, bearing upon gendered experiences of trauma and empowerment which sacrifice attention to narrative form to privilege a reading of authenticity. This project studies narrativity as a part of tangible feminist praxis in the works of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Doireann Ní Ghríofa, analysing how autofiction reinterprets postfeminist debates on community, labour and identity.
I have presented my research at national and international conferences, including the Lived Experiences Conference at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; English Graduate Students' Society (EGSS) Annual Conference at Université de Montréal; the Oxford English Graduate Conference at the Faculty of English; the (De)colonial Care: Place, Practice, Politics Workshop at University of St. Andrews and Memory and Past in South Asia Conference at SOKA University, Japan.
Teaching: I have experience teaching postcolonial literature, contemporary British Asian Women's Fiction, and memory studies to visiting students, as part of the Visiting Student Programme at Brasenose, Hertford and Worcester College. I will be assisting as a Graduate Teaching Assistant with FHS Paper 6 (Writing Lives) and supervising an undergraduate dissertation (on Joan Didion).
Links to my creative and academic writing can be found on my website.
I can be found here on twitter: @smritiverma__
Research Interests: life-writing, autofiction, narrative form, feminist theory, female authorship, world literature, postcolonial studies, feminist activism, narratology
Publications:
- "(Re)defining Metaphorical Address: Female Disability, Embodiment and Agency in Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom (2012)." Retrieving the Crip Outsider, edited by Someshwari Sati. Bloomsbury, 2024.