Alice Flinta
PhD student

Profile

Biography

My research interests have developed in the fields of translation, postcolonial, transnational, and migrant literature; I have conducted archival research on Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus’s manuscripts, and in my master’s thesis I explored how French author Michel Houellebecq reconceptualises Camus’s absurd, adapting it to the contemporary world.

Modern languages are an integral part of my research: I am fluent in English, French, Italian and Spanish and am currently learning Russian. A creative writing and translation enthusiast, my poems have been shortlisted in regional competitions on multiple occasions; in the context of promoting Finnish literature in Italy, some of my translations from English into Italian are published online.

I joined the Centre for Women’s Studies in September 2023 under the supervision of Dr Boriana Alexandrova and Dr Nicoletta Asciuto as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral candidate for the EU- and UKRI-funded project EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective. I completed my BA in English and Related Literature at the University of York and hold a Masters in Comparative Literature from the University of St Andrews.

Research

Overview

My research is rooted in the core belief that literature helps us understand and challenge our current political reality. For the EUTERPE project I am working on how transnational Mediterranean literature by women shapes a new sense of transnationality in Europe and challenges how we think of Europeanness.

With a focus on the literature of contemporary translingual, migrant and second-generation women writers, my project explores the intersection of gender, race, languages, and colonial histories and how it affects migrant writers’ narratives of identity formation, transnationalism, multilingualism, and translation. Some of the authors I am exploring are Hoda Barakat, Faïza Guène, Jhumpa Lahiri, Igiaba Scego and Leila Slimani. Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and Paul B. Preciado’s work are at the core of the project’s theoretical framework.