Talia Varoǧlu

I am interested in modernist and contemporary histories and they way they are portrayed in literature produced at the time, specifically British, German, and American literature. The military and social history of the World Wars in Great Britain, histories of trauma (related particularly to feminist discourses on "hysteria" and its overlap with "shell-shock"), and the communication between histories and presents of disenfranchised populations generally (from women to BIPOC to the
dying) all inform my current interests. 

RESEARCH BIO: My past research has studied the peculiar qualities of "being" and "non-being" in the fiction of Virginia Woolf--and, in particular, the special capacity trauma has to transmute moments of unlived or unrecognized banality into moments of conscious living and deep affective significance. I have also been interested in combining the disparate literary bodies of the two World Wars into a unified and interrelated production, seeking a novel approach to literary production informed by the historical perspective that sees the two conflicts as inextricably linked. My current research has turned to the medical humanities and--under guidance of scholarship from Canadian palliative care counsellor Stephen Jenkinson--the questions of death, dying, and the dead; how we navigate dying in a culture of "western" death-phobia; and how representations of and approaches to dying have changed in the last century, both as literary and social phenomena, and within the realms of public health, clinical medicine, and palliative and hospice care.