Sarah Waltcher

Thesis Title: Narratives of Transformation in the War on Terror

Supervisor: Maria Kelly & Elleke Boehmer

Research Interests: contemporary American literature, the war on terror, slow violence, ecocriticism, the politics of representation, gender/sexuality studies, feminist theory

Doctoral Research: My thesis explores post-9/11 literature, a genre often considered to document the rupture of national trauma. Instead, I turn towards narratives of personal transformation, questioning both how war on terror self-making may only be legible against the backdrop of racialized conceptions of personhood and value, and how stories of overcoming crisis foreclose structural critiques of the security state through their performance of progress.