Olivia King’s Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship funded doctoral research explores speech as the foundation of the worlds brought to life on the early modern English stage. Her dissertation examines powerful speakers in early modern English drama and focuses primarily upon the figure of the persuasive orator, particularly in the works of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare. Central to her research is a belief that drama, as a medium, foregrounds the perlocutionary dimension of language and gives prominence to the performative power of words. She is interested in the ways in which drama emphasizes language’s quality as action and how it encourages the consideration of language in networks of power and as a network of power itself. Olivia received her BA (Honours) in English Language and Literature and her MA in English from Brock University and is a member of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies and the Renaissance Society of America.

My dissertation examines how narratives of extraction, ruination, disaster, colonial expansion, and speculation intersect under the sign of the geologic in literatures produced in settler colonial contexts. While dominant discourses of the Anthropocene emphasize the human impact on the geologic record, these discourses often ignore the differential human contributions within colonial and capitalist systems to this “marking” of the earth’s strata. What does it mean to “read” rock, dust, stone, and sand, when reading is also excavation? I am interested therefore not only in how the geologic may be read thematically, but also how texts imagine and foreground readers and reading in relation to the geologic. Attending to how literary texts engage geologic materials and processes opens up alternative ways of theorizing care for, and in, the world.

I am a second year PhD student. My research interests lie in the areas of Gender, Sexuality and Postcolonial Studies. My PhD project explores the representation of sex workers within the Indian subcontinent. The research I am undertaking aims to look at how numerous narratives (such as, films, policy documents, memoirs and documentaries) construct the figure of the sex worker as a deviant body. Through my exploration I will be unpacking the abolitionist narrative contained within these discourses.

My research focusses on Indigenous literatures, decolonization of settler approaches, ecopoetry and ecological-focussed narrative. I am committed to finding ethical reading practices to engage with Indigenous literature as a settler-scholar.

My research interests explore the intersections of race, trauma, and sexuality in contemporary queer memoirs. In particular, I am interested in how queer memoirists represent memories of trauma and histories of sexual, racial, and colonial violence through nonlinear forms of time and space. As well, my research asks how engaging with queer memoirs that partake in affective modes of queer historicizing enables us to realize a vision of queer relations and coalitional politics that enacts queer possibilities for the future.

Her research explores asexual, aromantic, and platonic intimacies within queer Asian North America, with a particular focus on Pilipinx.