Amelia Zhou, Wolfson
Course: English
Supervisor: Professor Kasia Boddy
Dissertation Title: Intermedial experimentation in contemporary autotexts
Biographical Information
I am a third-year PhD candidate in the Faculty of English. I completed a BA in communication at the University of Technology Sydney (2015), and a one-year Honours degree in cultural studies at the University of Sydney (2017). I also gained a MA in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance (2020), where I was a Leverhulme Arts Scholar and awarded the highest achievement prize in my cohort. My doctoral project is funded by the Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship.
I have experience teaching Practical Criticism, Visual Culture, and Contemporary Writing Papers. Dissertation topics supervised: contemporary photo-poetry; Denise Riley. I welcome supervision enquiries related to my research interests.
I am currently an Emerging Critics Fellow at the Sydney Review of Books and was previously the co-convenor of the faculty's 20th Century and Contemporary Research Seminar (Lent & Easter 2025).
Research Interests
My doctoral project is situated at the intersection of literary and visual culture studies. It explores the political-aesthetic role of photography in largely anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present through a comparative approach, considering how authors invoke photographic images, discourses, and tropes to narrate individual and collective lives and histories reputedly disappearing, absent, or otherwise forgotten. This research involves a particular interest in life narratives that centre on themes relating to migration, atrocity, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Authors of note include John Berger, Michael Ondaatje, Brian Castro, Orhan Pamuk, Teju Cole, Valeria Luiselli, Anwen Crawford.
Research interests include: interfaces between modern/contemporary literature and visual culture (particularly photography and film); photography theory & criticism; text-image relations; modalities of the 'auto' (e.g. autofiction, 'autotheory'); critical & cultural theory; hybrid-genre and formally innovative contemporary writing; interfaces between movement, embodiment, and language; migrant literature and art.
Selected Publications
Essays
[Forthcoming] 'Limbo of Letters: On Brian Castro', Sydney Review of Books (2026).
'Mere words you say?: On Abbas-El-Zein', Sydney Review of Books (2025).
‘The Souvenir: On Antigone Kefala', Liminal Review of Books (2024).
Book (Creative work)
REPOSE (Wendy's Subway, 2024). Winner of the 2022 Wendy's Subway Book Prize.
Poetry/Prose
Recent: Runway Journal & Worms Magazine (Forthcoming, 2026); Creative-Critical.Net (2025); Decision [Chapbook] (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024).
