Dr Sirui Zhu

Profile

I joined the School of English, University of Leeds in 2021 as a PhD student. My current PhD project is funded by the China Scholarship Council-University of Leeds Joint Scholarship. 

I worked as a teaching assistant at Leeds in the module ‘Race, Writing, and Decolonization’.

I have presented my work at the following academic conferences: (1) ‘Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World’, hosted by the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris; (2) ‘Without Water We Are Nothing: The Poetics and Politics of Water in Anglophone Postcolonial Literatures’, hosted by the University of Lille. 

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5174-647X

Research interests

My research interests include phenomenology, ecocriticism, spectralities, African fiction in English, and South Asian fiction in English.

I am a member of the Postcolonial Studies and Environmental Humanities Research Groups in the School of English.

My thesis explores how the imagination of haunting helps us understand and describe our relationship with the natural world. I focus specifically on the works of four contemporary Indian English novelists, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. I experiment with an original methodology that draws environmental knowledge from fiction about haunting, and which combines ecocritical approaches with eco-phenomenological ones, especially those of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I also associate my research with various South Asian cultural traditions and contemporary international social-environmental issues, including immigration, colonialism, water crisis, climate change, and industrial pollution.

Qualifications

• BA, Chinese Linguistics and Literature, Wuhan University
• BA (Double Bachelor Degree), French, Wuhan University
• MA, Comparative Literature, Wuhan University
• PhD, English, University of Leeds