Jo Esra

School: College of Humanities
Department: English
Research Centre/Unit: Exeter Centre for Literatures of Identity, Place and Sustainability; Exeter Centre for Early Modern Studies; Exeter Centre for Medical History.

After graduating with a first class degree in English with Media Studies BA (Hons) at Falmouth College of Arts, I completed an interdisciplinary MA in Critical and Cultural Theory: The Body & Representation at the University of Reading, receiving distinctions throughout. My PhD thesis, an AHRC fully-funded Studentship, is supervised by Professor Marion Gibson and mentored by Professor Gerald MacLean. It develops work I undertook during my MA concerning the construction of English Protestant identity through a textual analysis of early modern English Barbary captivity narratives. Current research explores the multiple discourses operating within the contemporary representations, geographies, material culture and embodied practices of Barbary captivity. Examining the negotiated and contested subjectivities emerging from these discourses via conceptual frameworks such as mutability, providence, belonging and loss, religious/cultural/religious passing/conversion and geohumoralism, reveals how instances and imaginings of Barbary captivity contribute to an ambivalent relationship with Islam and participate in the construction of national and regional identities.