Julia Flattich
PhD project: “Feminist Life Writing Against Imperial Time: Autosocial Readings Across the Post-British Empire“
This project explores how contemporary feminist authors from across the former British Empire challenge imperial temporalities and develop alternative concepts of time through their use of experimental forms of life writing. Focusing on hybrid texts that combine autobiography, fiction, theory, and collective narration, it examines how authors such as Deborah Levy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Maggie Nelson, and others articulate for instance nonlinear, cyclical, relational, and queer temporalities shaped by migration, Indigenous sovereignty, queerness, and postcolonial transition.
Situated at the intersection of literary studies and sociology, the project combines literary analysis with postcolonial, Indigenous, and feminist theory. It investigates how genre can challenge the temporal structures that continue to shape contemporary feminist thought and how alternative temporal models grounded in relationality, multiplicity, embodiment, and collective experience reshape understandings of gender, empire, and postimperial experience. Methodologically, the project employs Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s autosocial reading practice while simultaneously expanding and further developing the genre of autosociobiography beyond its predominantly Eurocentric framework.