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.
Aditi Bhardwaj (PhD English)
Aditi Bhardwaj is a doctoral student in the Department of English at Concordia University, with a keen interest in exploring memory cultures in South Asia. Her research interests also include transnational feminist studies, diaspora studies and digital humanities. Her past work has explored interlinkages between critical literacy/pedagogy and Childhood Literary Studies, particularly in the Indian context. Additionally, she has worked on the remnants of the 1947 Partition of India in marginal testimonies of Partition survivors with a focus on post-memory, necessary amnesias and collective forgetting as evolving processes that make memory and trauma nuanced and dynamic. She holds a graduate degree in English Literature from Miranda House, University of Delhi (India).
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 PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University, where she investigates site-specific environmental and ecological questions through transdisciplinary artistic practice. Working across video, assemblage, and installation, her work explores landscapes as sites that hold layered histories, memories, and acts of care, examining how relationships between humans and non-human entities shape these environments. She holds an MFA from UCSD and a BA in Fine Arts from UCLA. Her current research on rice plant ecologies began in Seoul as part of a Fulbright-funded project.
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)
Dr. Kasia Van Schaik is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Co-director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of New Brunswick. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century North American literature, creative writing, autobiography, experimental writing, eco-feminist poetics, and cultural theory. She is particularly interested in the intersections between narrative, gender, and the environment. Before joining UNB’s English Department, Dr. Van Schaik held a two-year FRQSC postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Dr. Jill Didur at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology and taught literature, film, and creative writing at McGill University. At UNB, she teaches graduate and undergraduate-level courses on literature, film, and creative writing, and supervises graduate students working on literary fiction and nonfiction.
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.
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.
Marcelina Pitrowski (Postdoc)
Marcelina Piotrowski was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Milieux Institute (2020-2023). 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 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.
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 holds an MA in English from Concordia University. She 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 