January Winner - Sylvia Terzian

Congratulations to Sylvia Terzian, one of our January researchers!

Sylvia Terzian has recently completed her PhD in the Department of English & Film Studies, and was nominated for the Gold Medal of Academic Excellence. Her primary research interests are in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literature and Theory, with a focus on contemporary Arab North-American fiction.

Her dissertation, entitled “Arab Pluralities and Transnationality: ‘A Crisis of Diasporic Consciousness’ in Arab North-American Fiction,” is interdisciplinary in its engagement with historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, and cultural studies.

Drawing on several intersecting theoretical models —postcolonial and diaspora studies, trauma theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory—the dissertation addresses the implications of the experience of migration, settlement, and belonging for Arab consciousness and sense of identity in Canada and the United States. Her research focus, more broadly and comparatively considered, also extends into other literary traditions: in particular, Arabic Literature and World Anglophone Literature.

Sylvia has served as a teaching assistant during her MA and PhD at Wilfrid Laurier, and more recently, has taught two senior undergraduate courses, entitled “Middle Eastern North American Narratives” and “Post-9/11 American Fiction.”

January Winner - Ada Sharpe

Congratulations to Ada Sharpe, one of our January researchers!

Ada Sharpe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film studies, currently writing her dissertation on representations of accomplishment and the decorative arts in British women’s writing of the Romantic period.

Her SSHRC-funded research draws on a number of popular print forms emerging in Romantic Britain between 1780 and 1835, including the novel, verse collection, and gift book, and seeks to elucidate the ways in which literary representations of female accomplishment (such as drawing, painting, and embroidery) provide a familiar frame of reference through which women writers negotiate issues of gender.

Ada is particularly fascinated by lesser-known women novelists of the early nineteenth century, such as Mary Brunton and Amelia Opie, whose didactic fiction features some of the most virtuous, admirable, and accomplished heroines in British literary history. Ada’s research has taken her to archives in Britain and the US and enabled her to discover a wealth of bizarre and wonderful primary sources, including manuals on the decorative arts and conduct books on female amusements.