The Departments of Comparative Literature and Modern Languages are delighted to announce that Melanie Dilly has completed her PhD in German and Comparative Literature, entitled ‘Expatriate Writing: Post-trauma, Post-memory and the Postcolonial’ under the joint supervision of Professor Ben Hutchinson and Dr Axel Stähler.
Melanie’s thesis focuses on the relationship between postcolonial and post-World War II discourses in contemporary expatriate writing, with a particular focus on Germany on the one hand, and the partition of India on the other.
Her research seeks to show that the Holocaust and WWII have become fixed points of reference for the transnational memory of the traumatic events accompanying the partition of India: Works by Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, and W.G. Sebald use narrative strategies that already include and point to another trauma, be that the Second World War or colonialism.
Our congratulations to Dr Dilly.
For more details on a PhD in German and Comparative Literature, please see:
www.kent.ac.uk/secl/modern-languages/postgraduate/research-german-and-comparative-literature.html