Editors-in-Chief
Isolde Kors
is a student of the RMA Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in cultural history and literary studies, both obtained at Utrecht University. In her research, she studies the interrelations between culture and politics, with a current focus on literature and environmentalism. She is interested in how methodologies from the fields of literary studies and history can complement and respond to one another in approaching these questions.
Nora Westgeest
is a graduate of the MA Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. She also received an MA in English Literature and Culture from the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie in the field of trauma and memory studies and their connection to metaphysical universes in literature. She has her own weekly-ish newsletter and enjoys reading feminist literature.
Editorial Staff
Luna Njoku Dominguez
is an RMA student on the Comparative Literary Studies programme at Utrecht University. Prior to her master’s, she studied Liberal Arts at the University of Leeds where she majored in Cultural Studies. She is primarily interested in research surrounding utopianism, particularly the limits and potentialities of the utopian impulse and the ways in which the traditional utopian concept can be reimagined and reclaimed to acknowledge marginalised narratives. Currently she is focused on speculative explorations of more-than-human futurities, as well as the various iterations of feminist utopianism in speculative literature and film. She also enjoys writing poetry and visits to the cinema.
Imogen Grigorovich
is a student of the Comparative Literary Studies RMA at Utrecht University. Previously, she obtained her BA at the University of East Anglia, where she studied English literature and creative writing. Her research lies at the intersection of trans studies and disability studies, focusing on the processes through which queer bodies are rendered legible to power, and on how illegibility can be used as a strategy for queer survival. In addition to her research, she maintains a writing practice in which she explores writing non-human selves.
Luka Hattuma
is a graduate of the RMA Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University and is currently obtaining a second research master’s degree in Dutch literature. Looking at literature as a mode of poetic knowledge production and disruption, Luka engages with poetry and poetics in- and around the geo-political, eco-critical, and anti-capital spheres of (post)colonial spaces. She engaged specifically in the entangled epistemological (Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) and literary forms of aquatic resilience of Inuit throat singers in the Canadian Arctic North, and explored these Inuit poetic aqueous representations in relation to accumulating climate change and the transforming geographical ice-and waterscapes in the Arctic. Prior to this, she received a BSc in International Development Studies at Wageningen University, where she focussed on interspecies convivial conservation and intersectional forms of marginalisation in bottom-up approaches. At present, she is, next to her continuous avid exploration of the Circumpolar North, exploring the literary spaces of South Africa, Indonesia and Surinam.
Mara van Herpen
is a graduate of the RMA Comparative Literary Studies as well as the BA Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Their research interests include life writing, ecocriticism, new materialism, and the posthumanities. Their previous work has focused on the role of the arts in (re-)imagining relations between humans, nonhumans, and the environment. She also writes short stories and poetry.
Mahtab Fazlali
is an Iranian master’s graduate of Literary Studies at Leiden University and obtained her BA at Tehran in English Literature. She was a music teacher back in Tehran until she crossed her borders in search of broadening the scope of her life. She is involved with a Phenomenology which connects all living things to life as an experience of everyday life in its simplest form to answer this question: “How can this experience be passed on with words?” Her gaze at the world is focused on being rather than merely having; and this changed everything for her.
Dewi Kopp
is a student at the RMA Comparative Literary Studies at Universiteit Utrecht. She retrieved her bachelor’s degree at Amsterdam University College. There, she majored in humanities with a focus on literature, cultural analysis, art history and anthropology. She is particularly interested in cultural memory studies and postcolonial studies. At the intersection of these fields, she currently researches the contemporary representation of identity and colonial perpetration in the former Dutch colonies. She also enjoys writing, dancing and textile crafts.
Seda Bahar Pancaroglu
is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature and Cultural Studies at Çankaya University, Turkey. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English Language and Literature from Ege University and a Master’s Degree from Ankara University, where her research focused on narration in postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction. Her doctoral research investigates the nexus of memory and space in Anglophone literature, particularly concerning Cyprus’s partition. Her research interests include Anglophone fiction, postcolonial literature, postmigrant studies, memory studies, and ecocriticism. With extensive experience teaching English for Academic Purposes and English Literature, Bahar is now based in Utrecht. She is actively engaging with the Dutch academic community and is committed to leveraging literature as a means of fostering cross-cultural dialogue, enhancing representation, and promoting social change.
Athena Stefanakou
holds an MA in Literary Studies from Leiden University. Her research focuses on feminist criticism and the intersection of literature and visual arts in representing experiences of “female” bodies. Additionally, as a fan of speculative fiction, she has published an article exploring happiness and ideology in the work of Russian speculative writers, the Strugatsky brothers. Writing, storytelling, inventing and re-inventing worlds lie at the heart of her interests.
Michael Jadick
completed his BA in English at the University of Washington in Seattle, and recently obtained an M.Phil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from Trinity College in Dublin. His work primarily focuses on the roles of space and place in literature and philosophy, with a particular interest in how spaces and their users mutually imbue each other with a sense of identity, and how the orchestration of social spaces and environments reflect and shape societal power dynamics. These lines of inquiry have led him to explore a wide variety of literatures, focusing mainly on postmodernism, speculative fiction, climate fiction, magical realism, and urban fiction. His current research project is a comparative analysis which contrasts works of Weird fiction and their philosophical interlocutors with the epistemologies ontologies of Indigenous peoples of North America as articulated through scholarly works and fiction written by Indigenous and/or First Nations authors.