Current Supervisions
Émile Lévesque-Jalbert (FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow 2025-2027)
Writer, translator, and scholar, Émile Lévesque-Jalbert is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Milieux Institute and Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC). With a focus on contemporary literature from France and Quebec, literary arts, and the cultural history of plants, his work explores the cultural, affective, and discursive aspects of ecology. His current FRQ project investigates environmental storytelling in literary practices beyond the book.
Dharani Dhavamani (PhD English)
Dharani Dhavamani is a PhD student in the Department of English at Concordia University. Her areas of interest include environmental humanities, post-colonialism, Indian literature and heritage. For her post-graduate thesis (University of Edinburgh), she explored the connection between environmental histories and film narratives of South India and the United States. In addition to academia, she has also worked in the entertainment, communications, and higher education sectors. Before starting at Concordia University, Dharani was a Young India Fellow (2023) and the founding project leader of InHERIT at Ashoka University.
Priscilla Jolly (PhD English-ABD)
Priscilla Jolly is a PhD student in the Department of English, with an interest in how landscapes are created. Her current research draws on environmental humanities, landscape studies and postcolonial studies, and her project seeks to analyse the intersections of landscape and posthuman bodies, with a focus on speculative fiction. The project also looks at the creation of tropics as a spatial entity and the interaction of racialised bodies and the tropics. Apart from speculative fiction, Priscilla also enjoys reading contemporary eco-horror, and enjoys learning languages and fussing over houseplants.
Heige Kim is a transdisciplinary artist working with videos, assemblage, and installations to investigate location-specific environmental and ecological issues. Her practice explores landscapes regarded as toxic and examines how human-centric relationship with the environment produce relational imbalance. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from UCLA and an MFA from UCSD. Her current research in rice plant ecology began in Seoul as a part of a Fulbright funded research. She is a PhD student at Concordia University’s Humanities Interdisciplinary PhD Program.
Brennan McCracken (PhD English-ABD)
Brennan McCracken is a PhD student in the Department of English and member of the Speculative Life Research Cluster at Concordia University. His work draws on the environmental humanities and decolonial studies to investigate the imbrication of literary production with planetary-scale modes of systems-thinking. He completed his MA in English at Concordia in 2021.
Jessica Ruzek (PhD English)
Jessica Ruzek is an instructor and doctoral student in Concordia University’s Department of English, where her research focuses on the environmental humanities, forest/landscape literature and aesthetics, and postcolonial, decolonial, and media studies. At present, Ruzek’s work concentrates on themes of pestiferousness and abjectivity in forest infrastructures.
Darinka Szigecsan (PhD HUMA)
Darinka Szigecsan is a Hungarian-born creative non-fiction writer whose embodied practice lies at the intersection of philosophy and poetry. Her work explores questions of community, movement, queer ecology, and the body. While rooted in language and writing, her work is grounded in phenomenal, corporeal experiences and the senses. She understands writing not only as a form of critical and creative expression but also as a method for imagining and bringing new worlds into being. Her PhD project, Kin-aesthetic Ecology of Bodies and Belongings, seeks to foster more inclusive, diverse, and attentive modes of being and belonging. Darinka holds a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Environmental Humanities from Bath Spa University.
Past Supervisions:
Kasia Van Schaik (Postdoc)
Kasia Van Schaik is an FRQSC Postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, Technology, where she is researching new ways to attend to our landscapes and ecologies through environmental storytelling, feminist artmaking, and collaborative knowledge production. Kasia is the author of the story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth (University of Alberta Press, 2022), and the eco-poetry chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, which was turned into a concerto and performed by the Montreal music lab in 2019. Her current projects include a book of cultural criticism entitled Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius and a chapter on the uses of digital humanities tools in contemporary ecological poetry for the forthcoming Routledge handbook, AI and Literature. Kasia is also co-editing an essay collection entitled Shelter in Text, which interrogates the relationship between the physical and textual spaces we inhabit. Her essays have appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, Maisonneuve Magazine, English Studies in Canada, Electric Literature, Jacket2, and Senses of Cinema. In 2021, Kasia served as a CBC QWF writer-in-residence.
Marcelina Pitrowski (Postdoc)
Marcelina Piotrowski is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Milieux Institute. She completed her PhD in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education at the University of British Columbia. She did her Masters in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities. Her research focuses on environmental media, bio/political subjectivity, sensor technology, and posthumanism in knowledge projects aimed at education in ecological change. Her current SSHRC-funded project examines sensing in environmental media, especially ecological sensor technologies, chaos, and how conditions of planetary life are increasingly sensed through wearable informatics at the level of the personal and biological. It focuses on the extent that sensor data morph the idea of a ‘thinking subject’ while attempting to proliferate and democratize data for public environmental education. Her work is often informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, continental philosophy, and research creation through concept work. Her work has been published in Canadian Journal of Communication, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture; Critical Studies in Education, the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture, and Environmental Education Research.
Caroline Hebert (Postdoc)
Dr. Caroline Herbert is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at Leeds Beckett University. Her research centres on postcolonial literature and culture, specifically South Asian literature and film, and narratives of the postcolonial city.
Lai-Tze Fan (Postdoc)
Dr. Lai-Tze Fan is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Technology & Social Change in the Department of Sociology & Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada, cross-appointed in the Department of English Language and Literature. She works on media studies, science and technology studies (especially of biased design and AI), critical design (especially of technological hardware, software, and data), and methods of public/policy outreach through digital storytelling.
David Shaw (PhD)
David Shaw holds a PhD in English department from Concordia University. His research focuses on posthumanism, postcolonial theory, and the intersection of realism and climate change. He is the former coordinator of the Representing the Anthropocene reading group.
Brennan McCracken (MA)
Brennan McCracken is a student and writer from K’jipuktuk/Halifax, NS currently living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, QC. His MA thesis project considers the inscription of environmentalism in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead through Julietta Singh’s theory of “post humanitarian fictions.”
Sophie Falther (MA)
Sofie Falther is a MA student in the English department at Concordia University, who lives her life in between Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and Denmark. Her thesis project examines transmedia art and the politics of mourning. Her research draws on the intersections between environmental humanities, post- and decolonial theory, critical race theory, and Indigenous studies.
Jill Didur 