Boriana Alexandrova

Profile

Biography

Boriana joined York’s Department of English and Related Literature as Associate Lecturer in Modern Studies in 2017. She specializes in 20th-21st century literary multilingualism and translation, including Irish and European modernism, global and postcolonial studies, performance, and cross-disciplinary theories of embodiment. She works across several languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, English, German, and Italian. Her work engages with a wide range of methodological approaches from disability theory and the medical humanities to feminist, queer, and cultural theory, ethics, and politics.

Boriana lectures in the areas global and postcolonial literature, art, culture and theory, modernism, medical humanities, as well as British and Irish literature. She co-convenes York’s interdisciplinary MA in Medical History and Humanities with Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya (History) and teaches the interdisciplinary MA option module “Unspeakable Bodies: Theorising Queer and Abject Embodiment in Literature, Art, and Medical History, 1880-present” (Autumn). Her BA teaching includes modules such as World of Literature, Joyce’s Ulysses, and others.

Research

Overview

Boriana’s forthcoming monograph, Deplurabel Muttertongues: Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading as Foreigners (2020), explores the creative, political, and ethical value of multilingual writing and readerly experience in modernist and contemporary literature. The book is concerned with reading as a political, affective, and creative practice. It develops a transdisciplinary approach aimed at critically accounting for the transformative impact of readerly diversity (cultural, racial, geographic, linguistic, bodily, etc.) on the English language and Anglophone literatures. Deplurabel Muttertongues features several modernist and contemporary writers, prominently Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in dialogue with Kamau Brathwaite, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Vladimir Nabokov, as well as C. K. Ogden and Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, among others.

Boriana’s background as a creative writer, performer, and political activist is highly influential in her research. Her newest projects include a multilingual piece of staged poetic performance (including spoken as well as gestural languages), which is informing her practice-based research on minority cultural narratives in Europe and worldwide. A funding application for the project is currently in progress with the AHRC project Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS).

She is open to supervising projects in the areas of 20-21C global and postcolonial literatures (Irish, British, American, Caribbean, Central and Eastern European, Russian); British and Irish literature and drama (1880-1989); European modernism, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Eimear McBride; multilingualism and translation; disability, queer, feminist, postcolonial, cultural, linguistic, and narrative theory; medical humanities; or readerly engagement and performance.

Publications

Monographs

Forthcoming (2020): Deplurabel Muttertongues: Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading as Foreigners

Journal Articles

“Babababblin’ Drolleries and Multilingual Phonologies: Developing a Multilingual Ethics of Embodiment through Finnegans Wake.” A long the krommerun. European Joyce Studies (June 2016): 90-104.

“Wakeful  Translations: An Initiation into the Russian Translations of Finnegans Wake.” Joyce Studies Annual (2015):128-67.

Book Reviews

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride. In The James Joyce Broadsheet 106 (February 2017).

Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction by Juliette Taylor-Batty. The James Joyce Broadsheet 102 (October 2015): 2.