doctoral research

My doctoral research looks at new ways of engaging with history through historical fiction and writing of marginalised colonial women’s lives through fictional narratives which use fragments of actual source texts as intertextual elements, to frame or narratively interrupt female self narrated stories.

In this way a richer, multi-dimensional and non-linear view of female colonial experience can be achieved, which departs from that hegemonically imposed by patriarchy. The archival intertexts are juxtaposed against fictional re-narrativisations of the same events in order to challenge the past positioning of silenced women. 

The voices of the fictionalised female characters of my novel are heard as an absence, and the intertext, in conjunction with the derived fiction, now stand as a trace of what once existed as women’s lived experience.