Project Description: "My doctoral project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, analyses the reception of Graeco-Roman literature within the writings of enslaved peoples in North America and the Caribbean between 1780 and 1865. By appropriating an intellectual milieu regularly denied to enslaved peoples of America and the Caribbean, the writers I consider were able to communicate in the style of their oppressors with contemporaries who were sceptical about the injustice of racial prejudice. Therefore, my research addresses the rationale for the adoption of classical imagery and motifs and, simultaneously, the potential anti-colonial and abolitionist ramifications of these appropriations in both political and literary environments. I recently discussed this project in further detail on the podcast Tell Me Muse: https://open.spotify.com/show/3AyzngsO09A9FDLPMcZ3Mw.
Beyond my project, I have a broad interested in how post-/anti- colonial writers reimagine and recycle Graeco-Roman material in subversive ways."
