Boriana Alexandrova Alexandrova

I joined York’s Centre for Women’s Studies as Lecturer in September 2018. I was previously an Associate Lecturer in Modern Studies at the Department of English & Related Literature, as well as co-convenor of York’s MA in Medical History & Humanities with Prof. Sanjoy Bhattacharya (History). My specialisms include contemporary women’s writing and performance, 20th-21st century literary multilingualism and translation, including Irish and European modernism, global and postcolonial studies, and cross-disciplinary theories of embodiment. I work across several languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, English, German, and Italian. My work engages with a wide range of methodological approaches from disability theory and the medical humanities to feminist, queer, and cultural theory, ethics, and political activism.

I am a professional member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association and serve as a reviewer for several academic journals, including Medical History, CWS’s own Cultivate, and others. I served as Reviews Editor for Modernism/modernity from 2013 to 2016.

Modern and contemporary queer, women's, and modernist writing, art, and performance; (literary) multilingualism & translation; medical humanities & bioethics; disability & trauma studies; critical theory & feminist approaches; Irish & European modernism.

My forthcoming monograph, Deplurabel Muttertongues: Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (Palgrave 2020), explores the creative, political, and ethical value of multilingual writing and readerly experience in modernist and contemporary literature. The book is concerned with reading as a political, affective, and creative practice, exploring modernist representations of disability, sexual violence against women and girls, and the migrant experience, while querying the ways in which critical and reading conventions can obscure or violently reframe these “unspeakable” and marginalised narratives. The book engages with several modernist and contemporary writers, prominently Joyce’s multilingual tome Finnegans Wake (1939) in dialogue with Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Vladimir Nabokov, and other modern and contempoary postcolonial writers.

My newest project, Storytelling the Unspeakable, takes an interdisciplinary approach to historical abuse trauma narratives in contemporary women’s writing, digital feminist cultures, and performance art. This work engages with art-activists, writers, and performers including: Marina Abramović, Warsan Shire, Eimear McBride, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Dorothy Allison, and Margaret Randall.