New Directions in the Humanities Research Network

Aylin Dilek Walder is a lecturer and researcher at TU Braunschweig. She earned degrees in English and History while studying in Cologne, London, and Istanbul. Her PhD project, Beyond Alterity: The Fantastic Dawn of Affinity in Contemporary Speculative Fiction, centers on queer studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies. She has presented on fantastic kinship, climate hope, and eco-anxiety, and published on mental illness, cultural appropriation, and slavery studies. Her work appears in volumes such as The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy and Ecological Interdependencies. She also co-edits the annual proceedings of the Inklings Society and served as assistant editor for Anglistik.

Edna Holywell is a musician, musicologist and researcher specialising in early modern literature and cultural history. Her work explores the intersections between text, performance and ideology, with a particular focus on seventeenth-century opera and the politics of classical reception. She has published on allegory, pedagogical humanism and the evolving performance histories of Restoration works. She is the author of ‘Opera as Process: The Mutable Meaning of Dido and Aeneas’ and her second monograph is forthcoming. She has presented at national and international conferences and is committed to interdisciplinary approaches bridging literary scholarship, musicology and theatre studies.

George Funaki is a leitī, artist, independent curator and researcher currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau. His journey began within the fashion industry where he worked as an emerging and independent fashion designer, stylist and freelance project manager. However, his practice shifted once he identified issues of representation pertaining to queer-Pacific identities, specifically leitī, with an emphasis on New Zealand-born Pacific people. Funaki now works as an interdisciplinary practitioner whose practice spans across moving-image, performance, installation and writing to explore relationality. Within Funaki’s practice, they play a dual role–both symbolically and literally–as the subject and maker of their art, investigating how leitī phenomenology examines the mundane as a site of meaning-making. Funaki does this by referencing Pacific, feminist and queer theory, to look at how culture, body, and belonging can intersect and resist Western value systems through a leitī worldview.

Jaclyn Carter is a PhD Candidate in English studying the early medieval period. Her work interrogates early English and Scandinavian literatures from the lens of the Global Middle Ages, and contemplates pedagogical innovations that demonstrate the inherent value of studying the medieval past. Jaclyn is also a tenure-track educational developer at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, where her humanities training widely informs her approaches to cross-campus program innovation and curricular renewal.

Alexánder Ramírez has a Bachelor's degree in Foreign Languages and a Master's degree in Linguistics, both degrees obtained at the Universidad del Valle, in Cali-Colombia. He recently earned his PhD in Education with an emphasis in ELT, from Universidad del Valle, in Cali-Colombia. He wrote his dissertation on the promotion of interculturality throughout the curriculum of a Foreign Languages Teacher Education Program. Alexánder works as an English and linguistics teacher in the Foreign Languages Bachelor's program, in the Professional Program of Interpretation for the Deaf and Deafblind, and in the Master's in Interlinguistic and Intercultural Studies, all of them at the same University where he has been formed. His research interests and publications include topics such as intercultural communication, critical pedagogies, peer evaluation in writing processes, and Queer Linguistics.

Deborah Ariyo is a Nigerian interdisciplinary scholar specializing in African Francophone literature and cultural studies. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama, where she also serves as an instructor of record for undergraduate French language courses. Her research examines the intersections of gender dynamics, mental health, and societal development across sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. Her multilingual background enriches her scholarship with distinctive cross-cultural insights. Beyond academia, Deborah is a passionate advocate for women's rights, dedicating herself to community engagement and the fight against violence toward women, particularly female genital mutilation (FGM).

Ariadna García is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Philology at the University of Almería, Spain. She recently defended her doctoral thesis with cum laude on realist poetic discourses by George Sterling that circulated outside the canonical channels of the time, including unpublished manuscripts and local newspapers. She has produced bilingual English–Spanish editions of poetry by Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling, and currently researches underexplored poets as precursors of 20th-century modernism, with a focus on regional Californian poetry. Her work has been published in international journals and academic presses.

Nikoloz Esitashvili was awarded his PhD degree in International Relations in 2016 at Florida International University (FIU), Miami, USA. Nikoloz is a recipient of various research fellowships in his field. His fields of research are Political Economy, Security and Political Psychology. He is also an amateur philosopher. He follows a dispositionist-situationist framework of analysis integrating various fields of scientific inquiry into a holistic account of social-political phenomena. He is a Full Professor at Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA). He is also a Chief Scientist at the Scientific Research Center of David Aghmashenebeli National Defense Academy of Georgia.

Maria Joseph is a Research Scholar at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, India, whose work focuses on films of the body horror genre. Her research examines how cinema negotiates embodiment, technology, and identity within a posthuman framework. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Trichy. Her broader research interests include film studies, body studies, and the representations of technology and gender in contemporary media.

Jules studies marginalized identities and subcultures through an intersectional lens. Her current research focuses on how neurodivergent individuals who are also marginalized in gender, sexuality, or race self-identify and find support. Her previous research on gender and sexual minorities draws her toward the intersection of stigma and privilege in these contexts. Before joining Rutgers, Jules spent ten years in the research and nonprofit sectors developing social justice and community healing initiatives. She has an MA degree in sociology from The New School, publications in Sexualities and the Journal of Positive Sexuality, and an interdisciplinary background in the arts.