Ms Sirui Zhu
- Thesis title: Meditations on Eco-hauntology: An Eco-phenomenological Reading of Selected Recent Indian English Novels
- Supervisors: Graham Huggan, Dr Nicholas Ray
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’.
My publications: (1) Zhu, Sirui. 2024. “Ghostly Thinking and Fictional Dwelling: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Nature and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, August, 1–13. doi:10.1080/00111619.2024.2384523. (preprint) (2) 朱思睿. 2019. “取旧形式砖瓦,塑新民族形象——试论《黄衫客传奇》对传统文体的创造性转化.” 法国研究, 02,100-107. doi:CNKI:SUN:FGYJ.0.2019-02-011.
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