Psyfun Mustary is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She has an MA in English from UBC, prior to which she received her BA Honours and MA in English Literature from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her doctoral dissertation reads representations of colonial diseases in Romantic literature (1789-1832) in relation to questions of race, subjectivity, community, and aesthetics. Her current research interests include literature and medicine, science and medicine in the colonies, rhetoric of health and illness, migration and diaspora narratives, global Romanticisms, and South Asian literary modernity.
Q: What is the title of your research project?
A: My project is titled ““[O]n the inhospitable beach”: Colonial Diseases and the Limits of Transnational Solidarity in Romantic Literature.”
Q: What was the main focus of your research project during your time as fellow in the Centre?
A: During the CES Fellowship period, I wrote a section for my project on the smallpox inoculation and vaccination programs in mid-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century South America, which examines those medical interventions in relation to the transitional, or rather intertwined, movement between religious and secular ways of governing bodies and collectives. The section tracks the pre-Jennerian inoculation, quarantining, and baptismal prayers offered by Jesuit missionaries to treat smallpox among the Guaraní people in the eighteenth-century Paraguayan reductions. I read the Jesuit administering of medical care as a fitting case of early liberal imperial strategies, which, in many cases, defy easy categorizations between coercion and benevolence. My understanding of this non-reducible medical landscape will be formative for my reading of the Romantic poet Robert Southey’s millenarian representations of epidemics in South America.
Q: What drew you to this research project?
A: After immigrating to Canada from Bangladesh for my graduate studies, I initially experienced an intense sense of dislocation—both physically and emotionally. The first graduate seminar I attended at UBC, titled Romanticism and the History of the Senses, introduced me to scholarship on such “disorders” as nostalgia and drapetomania characterized by one’s persistent desire to return home from colonial lands. That body of scholarship offered me a vocabulary to make sense of my feelings as well as come up with my project’s overarching method of reading the body as a repository of history. Although the preliminary conceptualization of the project had happened before the COVID-19 pandemic, it took its current shape during my PhD comprehensive examination in the midst of the pandemic in 2021. The public health policies and political rhetoric around the COVID-19 pandemic have re-taught us that symbolic boundaries (e.g., of race, class, gender) may not disappear but become reified and regenerated in new guises during pandemics. My analysis of the vision of transnational solidarity in Romantic disease narratives has been significantly informed by this unfortunate insight.
Q: How did the UBC Centre of European Studies support your research project?
A: The CES fellowship stipend helped me access resources on histories of medicine, particularly on Jesuit medicine in South America and Unani and Ayurvedic medicine in India. Also, in the beautifully decorated CES office for the fellows, I was able to have dedicated writing times, which was much needed for me to break the cycle of procrastination. The CES talks throughout the term also made me feel belonging to a vibrant and engaged community of scholars and audiences.
Q: What are your plans after the fellowship and after your time at UBC?
A: I aim to defend my PhD dissertation next year. After PhD, besides expanding my current work, my plan is to develop a project on anticolonial Romantic writings that I started but set aside during my MA. For quite some time, I have also been considering studying psychology and hope to enroll in a counselling psychology program after PhD.
Psyfun Mustary was a 2024 CES Graduate Research Fellow. This interview was conducted by CES Project Assistant Braden Russell.