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.
Project Description
| My project examines the ways colonial diseases (e.g., smallpox, yellow fever) function as material and aesthetic vehicles for imagining both racial difference and solidarity in Romantic literature (1789-1832). Attending to the aesthetic and figural operations of diseases in both literary and medical writings, my project broadly examines what literature and literary analysis may offer to readings of medicine and epidemiology within an interdisciplinary framework. |