PhD student profiles
Maja Milatovic
Email: Maja.Milatovic@ed.ac.uk
Position:
- Third Year PhD
- Postgraduate Teaching Assistant
(Scottish Literature)<</div>
Outline Biography
Maja holds a Diploma (Qualified Teacher) in English and French Language and Literature from the University of Zadar, Croatia and an MA in Postmodern Fictions from Aberystwyth University, Wales. At the moment, she is completing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she was awarded the Edinburgh Global Overseas Research Scholarship as well as the Global Supplementary Grant from the Open Society Foundation. Maja works at the University of Edinburgh as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant in Scottish Literature. In 2012, Maja has co-organised an international conference Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment. She is currently developing an edited collection emerging from the conference as well as co-organising an international symposium Critical Pedagogies: Equality and Diversity in a Changing Institution. She is also the Education Coordinator for Hollaback! Edinburgh, co-organising community based events and workshops.
In her spare time, Maja enjoys science fiction, horror films and climbing mountains.
PhD details
Maja’s PhD thesis explores African American women writers’ neo-slave narratives and the complex connection between ancestry, embodiment and creativity by closely looking at novels by Margaret Walker, Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Phyllis Alesia Perry. More specifically, the thesis focuses on the novels’ contemporary protagonists and their relationship to a traumatic past involving an enslaved ancestor and the ways in which these experiences are mediated through the marked body and communicated through blues music, quilting, writing and domestic work. The thesis also examines the complexity of historical representation and the concept of unfinished ancestral mourning and its implications in contemporary American society.
In addition to African American literature, (neo)slave narratives and the Black Atlantic, Maja is passionate about Australian Indigenous narratives and more broadly, critical race studies, postcolonial, feminist and trauma theory and pedagogy.
Publications
This article was published on Mar 23, 2011