²Ñ¾±²Ô°ì±ðÌý´³´Ç²Ô°ì English PhD Researcher
I started my BA degree in English language and culture at University of Leiden in 2008. I was selected for the Harting exchange programme during my second year and subsequently spent the third year of my undergraduate at the ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ. At ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ, the module ‘Literature of Islands and Oceans' boosted my interest in maritime literature, which since then has remained a great source of inspiration. I completed my undergraduate degree in 2011, writing my dissertation on ‘The representation of streets and the city in late-Victorian literature' (supervised by Dr Michael Newton). I also obtained my MA degree in English Language and Culture (with a specialisation in translation between Dutch and English) from the University of Leiden. In my dissertation ‘Words are all that we can translate: Untranslatability and Moby Dick' (supervised by Katinka Zeven MA and Dr Evert-Jan van Leeuwen), I explored issues of untranslatability by comparing two translations of Moby Dick with the original.
I have always been interested in nineteenth-century literature and maritime narratives have held a great interest for me since studying Moby Dick during my undergraduate degree. This fascination resulted in my masters' dissertation on untranslatability issues in Moby Dick. My thesis, ‘‘I think I see the ghost of that Flying Dutchman in every ray of moonlight': nineteenth-century maritime ghost stories', is supervised by Dr Stephanie Jones and Professor Daniel Brown and combines my interest in both nineteenth-century supernatural literature and maritime narratives. I am studying the ship as a haunted space and place this research in a wider context of haunted literature in the nineteenth century and nostalgia for the Empire.
My current research aims to unite the themes of nostalgia, perceptions of religion and imperialism in a larger structural framework to look at how these themes resonate with nineteenth-century maritime ghost narratives, with a specific focus on the legend of the Flying Dutchman and other ghost ships. I am focusing on late-nineteenth-century narratives by Frederick Marryat, William Clark Russell, William Hope Hodgson and Piet Visser. These narratives and their authors were well-known in their own time but are nowadays largely forgotten. Written in the late-nineteenth century, these narratives evoke a sense of nostalgia in a time where the world was no longer unexplored territory but instead completely mapped and demystified. The study of haunted literature has so far largely ignored the ship as a haunted space, a niche my research aims to fill.