Current Doctoral Research Projects
Aïcha Bouchelaghem: Aïcha’s thesis addresses U.S. slave narratives that figure animality or specific nonhuman animals as ‘more-than-human'; in this context, ‘more-than-human' means beyond the reach of human strength, affect, cognition, and overall control. African American autobiographers derive textual authority from the ways in which they represent and interpret animals’ more-than-human agency. To read animals and animality in U.S. Antebellum slave narratives requires distinguishing between “animality studies” and other projects associated with “animal studies,” by drawing on the classification outlined by Michael Lundblad (2017). Indeed, the discursive function of animality in slave narratives cannot be apprehended fully through a methodology that seeks animal liberation or the critique of the humanist Enlightenment subject. Nevertheless, some texts do construct an animal ethics, even if that is not their primary project.
Mark Darcy: description forthcoming.
Anne-Elisabeth Donze: Anne-Elisabeth’s research focuses on the decline of the so-called Verb Second (V2) phenomenon – or subject-verb inversion – in the history of English. She focuses on two contexts in which V2 has been lost in Present-Day English (restricted when found to very specific uses, e.g. interrogative clauses with auxiliaries): inversion with auxiliaries and inversion with transitive verbs. She analyses by means of various statistical tools the decline of this word order in prose texts from the Old English to the Late Modern English period.
Georgia Fulton: Georgia’s project examines the under-studied intellectual heritage of Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus upon Shakespeare. Specifically, the project argues that the early, serio-comic literature of both Tudor humanists is comparable to Shakespeare’s tragicomic style. The main textual corpus includes the Tudor translations of Lucian, Utopia, The Praise of Folly, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Georgia argues that elements of satire, morosophic language, rhetorical paradox, irony, and metatheatre cohere to create productive ambiguity across the texts. She suggests that this productive ambiguity is the hallmark of both Tudor seriocomedy and Shakespearean tragicomedy, and is rooted in the literary style of the reformers.
Holly Lavergne: Holly’s project is entitled ‘Poetic Immortality: Acts of Remembering in Early Modern Women’s Poetry’. What does it mean to be remembered? This question is crucial for early modern women poets, whose concerns for poetic immortality have been undervalued by scholars. Her doctoral project examines the overlooked conceptual networks of remembering surrounding early modern women poets. By focusing on poetry, paratext, and reception, her thesis engages with the key textual agencies of poets, agents of publication, and readers. Ultimately, her project aims to analyze the layers of agency that form and reform women’s poetic reputations, as well as to reevaluate shifts in the construction and remembrance of women poets in the period during and after the English Civil War and Restoration.
Caroline Martin: Caroline’s doctoral project investigates how ideology manifests in narrative form through the analysis of New Woman short fiction from the 1890s. Her methodology draws on rhetorical and cognitive narratology to determine the textual mechanisms by which New Woman short stories shape narrative sense-making along ideological lines and situate their readers discursively in relation to contemporary debates on gender. Her corpus comprises established New Woman writers such as Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ella Hepworth Dixon, as well as more marginal authors rarely associated to the movement, such as Mary Wilkins Freeman and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
Eliis Maria Peters: description forthcoming.
Marianna Riishojgaard: Marianna’s research centers on the intersection between music and English Romanticism, with a focus on the work of Lord Byron. Her thesis, entitled "'Dare you to forget': Musical-Poetic Performance Expression in English Romantic Writing”, draws on the history of music and musical performance to explore a Byronic mode between poetry and music, which resists the binary between performance and sincerity. Reading Byron in this interdisciplinary way means, for example, thinking about the role of audience, risk, virtuosity, rhetoric, play and improvisation in his work, and considering how memory is played with and for in his between mode.
Martina Rizzello: Martina is pursuing her PhD as part of a SNSF research project on clausal case marking, a collaboration between the University of Geneva and Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia. Her work focuses on the morphology and semantics of prepositions introducing adjunct clauses in Romance languages. She is interested in explaining cross-linguistic patterns of syncretism in both the nominal and clausal domains through a nanosyntactic lens. In particular, she explores how logical relations such as purpose, reason, and cause - much like temporal relations - are often encoded through spatial mechanisms.
Luraghi, S. (2001). Syncretism and the classification of semantic roles. STUF – Language Typology and Universals, 54(1), 35–51
Elodie Rogliardo: Elodie’s research focuses on African American, Afropean, and Postcolonial studies. She is currently pursuing a PhD in which she examines how Afropeanity and Afropean literature enable young Afro-descendants to articulate experiences of unbelonging and othering, with particular attention to the emerging Afropean aesthetic in contemporary French Afropean writing. Her work draws on novels and poetry by Léonora Miano, Kiyémis, and Raphaëlle Red to explore questions of identity, music, and cultural memory. She also works as coordinator of the CUSO English doctoral program under the supervision of Prof. Swift.
Yarab Singye: Yarab’s research examines how aural modes and sound styles in contemporary films and series shape multisensory storytelling, drawing on audio-vision and cognitive film studies frameworks. By analysing dialogue, music, sound effects, and background noise, he demonstrates how filmmakers use sound and visuals together to evoke tactile sensations and emotional resonance. Sound design strategically manipulates pitch, timbre, rhythm, and texture to create trans-sensorial experiences, engaging viewers across multiple sensory domains. This study aims to highlight the narrative potential of aural modes, showing how sound and image collaboratively redefine boundaries in audiovisual storytelling.
Lancelot Stücklin: Lancelot Stücklin is completing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Geneva, focusing on the novels of Marcel Proust. His multidisciplinary approach combines existential phenomenology, psychology, embodied cognition and neuroscience. He draws on insights from the cognitive sciences to highlight the embodied nature of Proust’s literary style, thereby revealing links between consciousness, attention, sensorimotor processes and language. Central to his approach are the concepts of perceptual simulation and kinesic intelligence. Through this lens, he studies Proust’s engagement with predecessors such as Buffon, Nerval, Baudelaire and Renard, as well as Woolf’s reception of Proust.
Wenli Tang: This project is titled "FOCUS at the interfaces: From cleft-like constructions to sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese" . It investigates the highly-interfaced notion of focus by examining two seemingly unrelated phenomena in Mandarin Chinese: cleft-like constructions (shi...de) and sentence-final particles (SFPs). We identify different patterns within the shi...de construction and propose an analysis that accounts for both their similarities to English it-clefts—regarding focus effects—and their unique characteristics. The versatile functional element de, which appears as an SFP in certain contexts, prompts a general discussion on SFPs and a specific proposal featuring the left peripheral focus projection. Ultimately, this research seeks to enhance our understanding of the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Nora Zufferey: Nora is currently working on a PhD thesis titled ‘Listening to the Ground: Low Frequencies in Jazz Poetry and Dub Poetry’, where she explores the relationship between low frequencies and dub and jazz poetics as of the 1970s. She is interested in the extension of the sonic worlds of dub and jazz poems into music, and in the inter-medial connections between music and poetry since the 1920s. Her broader interests include African, West Indian and African-American literature, as well as critical race theory, performance studies, breath studies, cognitive studies applied to literature and musicology.
