Amy van der Merwe is a DPhil Candidate in English Literature at St Antony’s College. Her master’s thesis, completed at the University of Guelph, is titled “(Un)Conventional Forms: Exploring Contact Zones in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, Mary Barker, and Olive Schreiner,” and focuses on meaning-making in cross-cultural encounters between white and Indigenous women in the nineteenth century. Their doctoral research maintains their interest in intersections of race and gender. Considering Indigenous literature of the Northwest alongside canonical Bloomsbury modernists, she explores the shared potentialities of Indigenous and modernist masculinities in resisting modes of masculine performance that rely on the harmful logics of extractivism.
