Miscellanea ✨

(Re)Routing My Way to Defense

🗓️ April 19, 2025

I still remember a conversation with my advisor during my Master’s program. I had just finished reading Love Enough and said, “This novel needs a map.” The emotional and spatial landscapes felt inseparable, and I believed visualizing them geographically would offer new insight. But at the time, I was told mapping literature wasn’t a “scholarly” approach.

So instead, I wrote on What We All Long For, another novel by Dionne Brand, whose works I deeply admire and cherish. (I always return and turn to her novels, as they remind me why I set out on this path to study literature and culture. Her novels are my signposts.)

Years later, as a PhD student, I returned to Love Enough, and it became part of my dissertation after all.

While mapping per se does not interest me as much, that early intuition shaped my scholarship. As with my thesis, I explore literary texts through a systematic and comparative approach. Connecting the dots between a larger number of texts and building a body of evidence to crystallize and support a working concept, or confirm an intuitive hunch, is thrilling. Over the years of working on my dissertation, I have become increasingly comfortable experimenting with different ways of reading and writing. I sometimes get lost along the way, but I continue learning as I find my way back to the research questions that anchor my work.

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to pursue the research I once dreamed of, supported by the patience, kindness, shared enthusiasm, and generosity of my mentors, I’m even more excited to soon share it with my mentors and friends.