Isavella Vouza

Isavella Vouza 

DPhil Candidate  

Affiliation: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Expert in: Migration narratives, representations, and public opinion, Literary Representations of Migration
Geographic focus: Europe

Isavella's research focuses on situations whereby familiar reality becomes – even so slightly – unfamiliar as a result of (forced) displacement and processes of constant mobility as represented in twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction. Specifically, she investigates to what extent these modalities of estrangement or defamiliarisation may prompt a rethinking of traditional forms of connection, communal re-formation, and ways of belonging. Situated at the intersection of literary studies, affect studies, and diaspora theory, her dissertation specifically addresses literary representations of migration in relation to diasporic experience as portrayed in Anglo-Caribbean novels set in the 1950s, migrant labour as represented in Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1960s experimental novels, and the experience of itinerant transitoriness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1990s-2000s novels. Overall, her work seeks to bring forth a redefinition of ‘how to belong’ by looking at how literary works can create alternative ways of forming attachments through, rather than despite, processes of estrangement.