(Re)Routing my way to defense

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.

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

While I no longer focus on ArcGIS or mapping per se, that early intuition shaped my methodology. I now explore literary texts through systematic and comparative approaches and have become more and more comfortable experimenting with different ways of reading and writing something I’ve grown very proud of.

I’m grateful to have gotten the opportunity to pursue the research I once dreamed of and even more excited to soon share it with my mentors and friends.