Our program is empowered by a welcoming and diverse community of students with a uniquely global perspective. Together we are making things right for our communities and our future.
Ali Hassanpour Darbandi is currently a PhD candidate in the English Department at York University. He completed his B.A. at Allameh Tabataba’i University and his M.A. at the University of Tehran in Iran. His research was funded by Iran’s National Elite Foundation for two years.
He has done some work on nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His research has been published by Neophilologus Springer, Anglia: Journal of English Philology, Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for American Studies, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (Universität Tübingen), and others. He often focuses on secularization narratives in US antebellum literature, how religious and secular concepts are intertwined, and the privatization of religion in the context of the Second Great Awakening. Ali is also interested in the philosophy of religion and the philosophical interpretation of literary works. He has translated a series of philosophical essays from English to Farsi, titled Marxism, Analytic Philosophy and Language, which investigates the newly founded relationship between Continental philosophy and Analytic philosophy, particularly the recent interest of philosophers like Robert Brandon and Paul Redding in Hegelian thought.
Ali’s CV and publications can be found on this website.
Email: alihass@yorku.ca
Braedon Balko received an Honours B. A. with High Distinction from the University of Toronto in 2017 and an M. A. in from York University in 2019, during which he earned the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Master’s Scholarship. In 2020 he became a doctoral student in the department of English at York University.
Braedon’s research interests lay primarily within the field of trans-Atlantic modernism, and he is particularly focused on the writing of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Langston Hughes. His research draws from postmodern conceptions of language and he plans to incorporate this theoretical background into an analysis of these preeminent modernists. Other periods of interest to Braedon include the 1950s in the United States and the English fin de siècle. He has done academic work on Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov, and George Orwell, among others.
Breanna Simpson is a Doctoral Candidate at York University. She works on gender studies and queer theory, classical reception, world literature, and late Victorian fiction. Her doctoral research examines the coding of desire in ancient and Victorian prose narratives, with a focus on how it influenced power negotiations and identity formation in both periods. This work expands on her MA thesis, entitled “A Purposeful Infection: Lovesickness and Gender in Heliodorus.”
As well as her doctoral degree, Breanna is working on a diploma in world literature. She has presented papers at ACCUTE (2019), and the British Association of Canadian Studies (2018, 2019), and has been a recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2019-20).
Breanna holds a BA in Classical Studies and English Literature (2015), as well as an MA in Ancient Culture, Religion, and Ethnicity (2017), from the University of British Columbia.
Dorota Biedrzycki is a writer and PhD student in English at York University. Her doctoral dissertation explores the complicated relationship between exilic women's writing during the modernist period and canon formation. Her research is supported by the St. George's Society of Toronto Endowment for Graduate Student Award. She received her honours BA (from Glendon College) and MA (from Concordia University) in English. For her writing, she was awarded the Richard Teleky Short Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
Emma Joyal (she/her) is a first-year English PhD student. She earned her Honours BA in English alongside a minor in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Winnipeg, and an MA in English from the University of Toronto. Emma’s research interests include queer theory, feminist theory, and comics studies, to name but a few.
Emma is entering this first year of the PhD program with a desire to explore the ways in which comics and graphic novels evoke queer affects, while also considering what exactly it means to feel queerly.
Erika Hunter (they/them) is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English at York University. They hold a BA from the University of British Columbia, where they majored in English literature and completed an Honours thesis. They also have an MA in English literature from the University of Toronto. They are currently reading and writing about queer studies, decolonial and abolitionist frameworks, and experimental, autofictional literary texts.
Jasmine Gui is a doctoral student attentive to decolonial, diasporic literature and media, and an interdisciplinary artist working in paper, ceramics and collage. Her SSHRC-funded work takes a research-creation approach to the diasporic zine as material art object and literary text, its modes of production, circulation and documentation, to push for decolonial visions of transnational relations.
She is the co-founder of TACLA, a documenting commons initiative. Her work has been exhibited at Xpace Cultural Centre, and featured in publications such Hungry Zine, Canthius, Room Magazine, Held Magazine, SineTheta, GUTS Magazine, and The Spectatorial amongst others. She was the managing editor for (re)Rites of Passage: Asian Canada in Motion, a special anthology featuring Asian Canadian media artists on the contributions, maturations and evolving sensibilities of Asian Canadian film and media creation.
Jasmine holds a B.Ed. (2014), a B.A. in English & East Asian studies (2014), and M.A in English, Diaspora and Transnational studies (2016) from the University of Toronto. She also works at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival as their special projects programmer.
Joseph Sereney is a second-year PhD student. He received his Spec. Honours BA and MA from York University, where his Master’s Research Project was titled “Prophecy and Gender in the Shakespearean Court.” His dissertation explores intersections of prophecy, gender, time, and the self in modernist literature. His other research interests include the decadent movement and contemporary experimental poetry.
Mark Buchanan is a PhD Candidate in English at York University. His dissertation examines depictions of food and alcohol in Canadian fantasy literature. His dissertation uses the lens of food studies to investigate the way depictions of food and alcohol in the genre reflect issues of gender, race, and class. The commonplace reality of eating and drinking expose deeply entrenched power structures. His study goes beyond simply stating the fact that racism, sexism, and classism exist in much Canadian fantasy literature, but examines depictions of food and alcohol that affect how social hierarchical power structures are created in the texts. He also examines the ways food and alcohol illuminate how authors are working to subvert traditional entrenched ideologies of racism, sexism, and classism in the genre.
Mark completed both is BA (Hons.) (2014) and MA (2016) at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. His MA thesis was titled “How Alcohol Use in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Perpetuates Late-Victorian Traditions of Racism, Sexism, and Classism.”Mark has presented his research at venues such as the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020) the International Conference of the Children’s Literature Association (2018), and the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (2019), among others.
Matthew Dunleavy received his BA (Hons. with Distinction) from Concordia University and his MA from York University. His work examines the gender politics among the inhabitants, philanthropists, and journalists of the Late-Victorian/Early-Edwardian East-End London slums in a dissertation tentatively titled “Cleaning Up the Streets and the Sheets: The Reform Work of Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness, 1880–1915.” The work will also interrogate the intersection of language that illustrates a preoccupation with poverty, dirt, and sex when dealing with these slums.
He is the recipient of the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2019–20), the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship (2014–15), St. George Society of Toronto Endowment (2015–21), Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2016–19), and the York University Entrance Scholarship (2014–16).
Degrees earned:
Ph.D. (ABD), York University
M.A., York University
(Hons.) B.A., University of Toronto
Maybelle Leung (she/her) is interested in the connections between medieval and modern thought. Her research is on late medieval English and French literature, the history and theory of subjectivity, and literary medievalisms.
Maybelle’s SSHRC-funded dissertation argues for a return to the psychoanalytic criticism that interested medieval scholars in the 1990s to early 2000s. Turning to the French allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose and works of Geoffrey Chaucer, she argues that a concept of “non-separation” constructed out of separation, which psychoanalysis broadly defines as the gap between self and l’Autre [Other], shaped the contours of subjective knowledge in these texts—subjective knowledge of bodies, of language, and of enjoyment. Her work is published in Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History (2019) and Palimpsestes: Revue de traduction (2022); she has also contributed to Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies (2025). Currently, Maybelle is working with Deanne Williams on a project titled Shakespeare and the Global Middle Ages.
Monique Attrux is a doctoral student in the English program at York University. Her research centers on the intricate interplay between language, ethnic identity, and literary production in Chinese Canadian literature. She is deeply passionate about exploring how language shapes and reflects ethnic identities in the realm of literature.
Her academic journey has been enriched by the generous support of the York Entrance Scholarship (2020), Vivienne Poy Hakka Research Award (2020), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2021), the SSHRC Joseph-Arman Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship (2022), the Canada-China Initiatives Fund (2022), and the Clara Thomas Scholarship in Canadian Studies (2023).
Before embarking on her doctoral journey, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and linguistics from the University of Hong Kong in 2017. She further honed her scholarly skills by completing her Master of Arts in English at York University in 2019.
Teaching is not just a profession for Monique; it's a passion. She firmly believes that education is a cornerstone of personal growth and societal transformation, not only for students but also for educators. Her teaching philosophy is rooted in the idea that education has the potential to shape lives and perspectives. To that end, her teaching style blends the roles of coach and facilitator, aiming to empower students to understand literature and to engage with it actively and critically.
Nasra Smith is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in English, completing also a Masters of English (2016), Masters of Education (2014), and a Spec. Hons. BA (with distinction) in Individualized Studies at York University. Her research intercedes East African literature and Indian Ocean studies to centralize coastal eastern Africa from Eritrea to Mozambique and its archipelagoes. Her dissertation draws from the historiographic longue duree, oceanic humanities and vast global trade of the Indian Ocean ports to explore the relations between space, place and literature. By arguing the port is a polyvalent space of real, imaginative, and aesthetic conditions, her work interrogates the dialectics between class, history, language, geography, and migration from the medieval era to our contemporary world. Fluent in Somali, Swahili, and with (working knowledge) of Arabic, her interdisciplinary methodology engages with questions of indigeneity and African sovereignty, Euro-imperialism and Arab-Islamic servitude, Marxist geography, subaltern studies, archaeology, environmental studies, and postcolonial studies.
Nasra will conduct archival research at Yale University, the Library of Congress, Cornell, and CUNY as part of a Trudeau fellowship (2019-20). In addition to library fellowships in the US and Canada, she is awarded the PSA (2019), Anne Simone Award (2018), York Graduate Scholarship (2014-2016), and two UN Student awards. She has presented at MLA International Symposium (2019), CACLALS (2019), ACCUTE (2018), BCPS (2018), York Glendon (2017), and PCA/ALA (2015), and invited talks to African Students Association and the UN in Central America, Mexico, and New York.
Nasra will be the Visiting Lecturer/Research Fellow at the Obama Institute for Trans-American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg Universitat in 2021or 2022. She is also awarded and will attend the Black Europe Summer Institute (BESS) in Netherlands in June-July 2021. Her articles in CCLA (2021), Studies in Canadian Literature (2022), a chapter in Cultures of Citizenship (2022) and two in ASQ (2021) are forthcoming.
Nasra writes poetry, non-fiction, and current affairs articles.
Peter Unwin is the author of numerous books, including Searching For Petronius Totem (2017). His most recent novel, Written in Stone, was released in October, 2020, and his latest collection of poetry The Infinite Park is set for release in the spring, 2021. His academic work investigates the narratives of old and new media, the material makeup of the written word, and the discourse known as “the death of the book.” His essays and critiques have been published by the Canadian Journal of Communications, the Oxford Press, Penninsula: A Journal of Inter-relational Politics, and special issue of Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. He lives in Toronto with his wife and daughters.
Rashika Desai is a PhD candidate in English at York University. Her research focuses on haunted urban spaces in contemporary dystopian fiction. She examines how the dystopian and gothic modes converge through the lens of postcolonial theory and spatial studies.
She earned her BA in English from St. Xavier's College (Mumbai, India) and MA in World Literature from the University of Warwick (Coventry, England).
Sandra Lau is a part-time PhD candidate in English at York University. She received her English Specialist H.B.A. from the University of Toronto and her English M.A. from York University. Currently, she is exploring the experience of space and time in Chinese/North American literature and Chinese literature (classical and modern). Outside of her studies, she works as a Copywriter at a creative agency, where she enjoys demonstrating the power of narrative in modern media. Her poetry has appeared in PRISM international.
Solomon earned his BA and MA in English at the University of Northern British Columbia, in his hometown of Prince George. His MA thesis was a creative-critical hybrid that blended the study of musical theatre - as both an art form and a communal practice - with poststructuralist theory - particularly that of Derrida. He worked in non-profit theatre administration in Prince George and Vancouver before moving to Toronto to begin his PhD at York. His research interests include modernism, James Joyce, performance, theory, religion and literature, and Can-lit. His dissertation research focuses on hell in Modernist literature. Solomon is currently co-chair of York's English Graduate Student Association. Current and prospective students may feel free to reach out at solg@yorku.ca.
Stacey Dowswell is a PhD candidate in English at York University. Drawing on Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, her research examines narrative and identity relationally, with a focus on post-apocalyptic and world literature. She critiques universalist assumptions in narrative theory and world-literature scholarship, proposing more relational, cross-cultural approaches.
Tamara Frooman (she/her) is a PhD candidate at York University. Her dissertation, “Death Sentences: Accounting for Mortality in Life Writing” explores how illness narratives contribute to identity-formation and help shape sociocultural understandings around life and death. Her first true love was critical theory.
Theo Fox (he/him) is a PhD student in English at York University. He specializes in drama, Renaissance literature, and representations of the disabled body on early modern and modern stages. His dissertation, “‘by my lookes into my manners prie’: Early Modern Representations of Disability as Symbol, Cipher, and Censure,” examines early modern drama through the lens of critical disability studies, focusing specifically on the perceived relationship between disability and ethos. Through comparative analysis of literary representations of Richard III across verse biographies, chronicle narratives, and playscripts, he problematizes the relationship between metaphor and disability, disease and perceived deviance, and narrative and national memory. His project both demonstrates and rejects the extensive literary tradition that frames disability as a mere cipher through which authors can explore aesthetics, ethics, or moral perversity. By extension, Theo critiques the scholarly impetus to further marginalize disabled people through studies of disability as a set of symbols rather than a lived experience. Instead, he utilizes contemporary theories and models of disability studies to suggest that early modern playscripts offer a vital opportunity to analyze how disability has been codified in literature as simultaneously a symbol with multiple significations, a cipher for moral perversities, and a censure against cultural deviancy. Across his doctoral research, he seeks to illustrate how new perspectives in disability studies allow for resistance, self-definition, and autonomous counter-narratives.
Theo completed both his MA (‘19) and his Spec. Hon. BA (‘18) in English at York University. He also has a background in creative and commercial writing, having previously worked in copywriting and communications, and is passionate about accessibility and knowledge mobilization.
Zahra Sheikhi is a PhD student in English at York University. Her doctoral research explores the relationship between the female body, power, violence, and space in feminist dystopian literature, with a focus on women’s identity, agency, and autonomy. Her broader research interests include feminist literary studies, dystopian literature, embodiment, spatial theory, violence, and identity politics.
Zahra holds an MA in English Language and Literature from Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran. Her MA research focused on identity politics, grotesque violence, and humor in fiction. She has co-authored an article on Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicle, published in Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos.
Zoe Di Pinto is an English Master’s student at York University. Zoe has done her BA in English Literature at York University, and plans to do her PhD somewhere in Ontario.
Zoe’s main interests include queer vampire literature, lesbian literature, contemporary literature, satire, gothic literature, and creative writing.
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