WHO AM I?
I gained my PhD in French and Francophone Studies from University College Dublin (Ireland) in 2025. Prior to that, I completed an MA in French Philology and Anglophone Cultures and Literatures at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), where I had also carried out my undergraduate degree.
My doctoral thesis, funded by the Irish Research Council (now known as Research Ireland), was entitled "Writing Home: Haiti and Vietnam in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï."
The interdisciplinary study examined the concept of 'home', taking as its departure the understandings laid out by spatial theorists, in particular Doreen Massey. Seeing one's home as a material, geographical and imagined space, it argued that Laferrière's and Moï's works present 'home' as a dynamic place into which the returnee reinserts themselves, and in which the returnee participates, rather than a place to be refound or reconstructed by or for the returnee narrator. I therefore examined the relationship between home and diaspora, mobility and immobility, as well as Laferrière's and Moï's representations of family and the domestic space, specifically focusing on their depictions of domestic labour. Looking at 'home' on local and global scales, I ultimately argued for a re-evaluation of the relationship between understandings of the self and current conceptions of home in postcolonial autofiction.
I am now working on a new project: 'Vietnamese' Across 'Europe': Displacement, Identity and Dis/connections (VAEDID). This will examine Vietnamese diasporic writing, as well as film. Some information here, more to come soon!
