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Peri Sipahi, M.St., M.A.

Research Assistant

English Department
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Johannisstr. 12-20
48143 Münster
Germany

Room: ES129
Phone: +49-(0)251-83-24551
E-Mail: psipahi@uni-muenster.de

Office hours:
Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m.
Register here.


Peri Sipahi is a research assistant at the chair for English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster. She holds a M.A. in English Literatures and Cultures from Bonn University and additionally completed a M.St. in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2018. Prior to her position at Münster, Peri worked at Bonn University as research assistant (maternity-leave substitute) and WHK.

Her PhD project with the preliminary title “Of Time Wounds – Deconstructing Anthropocene Temporalities in Anticolonial Climate Fiction” examines the colonial legacies and continuations of time-centred discourses and frameworks inherent to the geological epoch hailed as a ‘radical break’, the Anthropocene. Essentially this means deconstructing many different levels of its inherent timescapes such as its racialized understanding of progress, dismantling geology as an imperial historiography and proposing an otherwise of representing and thinking with time that she proposes to call anticolonial scale critique. Utilizing the notion of ‘slow violence’, this project frames these violent temporalities as time-wounds in order to investigate anticolonial climate fiction written by Indigenous, Black and PoC authors.

 

  • Research Interests

    • Time and temporalities
    • Climate fiction
    • Environmental Humanities
    • Postcolonial theory
    • Indigenous literatures
    • Energy Humanities
    • Pacific literatures

  • Publications

    Sipahi, Peri. “Violent Temporalities, the Colonial Museum, and the Fantasy of Terra Nullius in Tara June Winch’s ‘The Yield’” Australian Studies Journal/Zeitschrift für Australienstudien, vol. 37, 2023, pp. 31-47, doi:10.35515/zfa/asj.37/2023.03.

    Maricocchi, Rita and Sipahi, Peri. Conference Report for the 32nd Annual Conference of GAPS. 2022, https://g-a-p-s.net/past-conferences/conf2022/

    Sipahi, Peri. “Silent Signs of Remembrance – Botanical Representations of Memory in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Inklings Jahrbuch, vol. 36, 2020, pp. 113-128.

    Sipahi, Peri. ‘A Mighty Matter of Legend’ – Tolkien’s Rohirrim. A Source Study. Tectum, 2016.

  • Conference Papers

    "Weaponizing Time in the Museum – Tara June Winch’s The Yield”
    Emerging Research in Australian Studies, 1st Interdisciplinary Workshop for Early Career Researchers of the Society for Australian Studies, University of Cologne, 16th-17th September 2022.

    "'not yet - under water' - Rejecting Victimhood and Negotiating the Implicated Subject in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Ecocritical Poetry”
    Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, 26th – 29th May 2022.

    “‘The Universe is a Memory of Our Mistakes’ – The Cyclicality of (Future) Histories in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods”
    Anticipatory Environmental Histories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene, digital conference, Augsburg and Freiburg University, 24th – 25th February 2022.

    “Gothicising the Victorian Sanctuary – Boundaries and Space in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”
    Anne Brontë at 200 Conference, Bonn University, 17th – 18th January 2020

    “Silent Signs of Remembrance – Botanical Representations of Memory in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”
    Annual conference of the German Inklings Society Flora and Fauna in Fantastic Worlds, Bonn University, 08th – 09th March 2019

  • Teaching

    Uni Münster

    Winter Semester 22/23
    Seminar Literary and Cultural Studies: Imagining and Narrating Migration and Flight

    Reasons for migration are many and not all of them are recognised. They comprise persecution based on political activity, religion or sexuality, a lack of economic possibility, forced indenturship or enslavement, war and more recently the climate crisis. In this course we will survey and interrogate the fictional depiction of varied contexts and conditions of migration in Anglophone literature as well as the discursive and poetic strategies involved in the process. The primary readings cover several genres such as novels, poetry, graphic novels or short stories which deconstruct, question and unsettle the stereotypical notions ”that all migrants are eager to leave their home countries; that migration is optional; that migration is permanent and unidirectional [or] that the ultimate goal of migration is to assimilate to a new place” (Ahmed xviii). We will have a detailed look at concepts relevant to the topic of migration literature such as displacement, diaspora, belonging, home, citizenship, the nation and borders. Furthermore, we will question the essentialist and exclusionary definitions of terms like ”refugee”, ”economic migrant” and ”in/voluntary migration”.

    Summer Semester 2022
    Reading Class: Gruppe II, 4. Sem. (Literature & Culture), Module: Readings in Language, Literature and Culture
    Social Media, Social Movements, and Narrative | M.A. and M.Ed. Seminar, co-taught with Dr. Deborah Nyangulu

    Winter Semester 2021/22
    “Ecocriticism, Gender and Postcolonial Theory in Contemporary Literature”, Module: Theory and Literature, B.Ed. and M.Ed. Grundschule

    Summer Semester 2021
    Teaching “Introduction to Climate Fiction”, Module: Theory and Literature, B.Ed. and M.Ed. Grundschule

    Bonn University

    Winter Semester 2020/21
    “Climate Change and the Anthropocene in Postcolonial Literature”, Module: Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, M.A. English Literatures and Cultures

    Summer Semester 2019 & Summer Semester 2020
    Term Paper Writing

  • Academic Activities

    20th – 22nd October 2022: Co-organiser of the Postcolonial Narrations Forum under the title: “Postcolonial Matters of Life and Death”. You can find the programme here.

    co-authored with Rita Maricocchi: conference report for the 32nd Annual Conference of GAPS in 2022 available here.

    23rd – 24th February 2022: Chair of the panel entitled “Migration and Belonging” at the symposium Agency, Community, Kinship – Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood, hosted by the Zentrum für Erzählforschung and the Department for English and American Studies at Bergische Universität Wuppertal

    02nd – 13th August 2021: participation in the international online symposium Climate | Changes | Global Perspectives hosted by the University of Würzburg

    SoSe 19 – SoSe 2021: Co-founder and organiser of the student lecture series (Re-)Searching Voices at the Department of English, American and Celtic Studies, Bonn University