Mona Rahimpour
PhD
Mona Rahimpour is an academic at the University of Melbourne. She is currently in the third year of her doctoral research at the University of Melbourne researching the dynamics of feeling and form in a species of contemporary novels.
Mona is a Graduate Research Teaching Fellow in English and Theatre Studies and has taught "Literature, environment and Crisis" and "Popular Fiction". Before moving to Australia, Mona was an Erasmus Mundus fellow at the "Crossways in Cultural Narratives" scheme in France and Germany and tutored at the University of Tübingen.
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Thesis
Doom Lit: Affect and Aesthetics at the End of Times
My Phd project establishes a new category of contemporary fiction, which mediates an acutely present moment
and the intersecting crises facing late-capitalist societies globally. The novels, I have
conceptualized as doom literature or 'Doom Lit', project imminent planetary
threats into unsettlingly near futures, where human subjects struggle to adapt to acute ontological and
existential disruption. I argue that doom -both as a steady thematic concern and an affective formation - is refracted in contemporary global fiction which takes irreversible ruptures in human history as its subject. I propose to read these works in line with the relationality between their distinct aesthetic properties and their affective qualities.
Research interests
- Contemporary Novel
- Affect Theory
- World Literature