Current PhD Students

Zara Stubbs

Thesis Title:

Eating Bodies, Assembling Selves: Mystic Women, Transformation, and The Uncanny Gastronomic in Contemporary Literature

Supervisor(s):

Dr Alice Hall & Dr JT Welsh

Description:

Zara is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing.

Her thesis investigates the connections between gastronomy, mysticism, and the transformative potential of women’s bodies. Zara focuses on contemporary literature, extrapolating the rich literary heritage of post-2000s women’s fiction. Considering the role of food as a rich literary and cultural symbol, and as a marker of the fallibility of bodies as organic mechanisms in a postmodern age, her thesis posits human-food relations as a series of unruly, complex negotiations.

Her research functions via the assertion that magic, folklore, psychology, and body often work together to form a complex and multifaceted sense of embodiment and human experience. This means that the supernatural elements in many contemporary texts are key to unlocking the meaning-making of food-based narratives. Focusing on unravelling the literary conventions of magical realism, fairy tale/ folktale, myth and magical realism, her research considers the specific association of food with the female form in the cultural imagination. Ultimately, her research focuses on the role of the uncanny gastronomic in unlocking constructions of genre, and gender at the site where the physiological and the phenomenological meet.

Her wider research interests include contemporary fiction, contemporary gothic, magical realism, the bodily and the grotesque, folklore and storytelling heritage, subversion of form, monstrous/rebellious figures, the physical manifestation of the psychic; and the new literary weird.

Zara holds a BA in English and Related Literature and a MA in Medical Histories and Humanities, both from the University of York. Zara has written for the Medical Humanities magazine The Polyphony and has delivered papers on her research at the Durham Castle Conference 2022 and the University of York’s 2022 English PhD Festival.