Writers @ The Hunterian - Who we are
The Writers are PhD students in Creative Writing:
Nikki Cameron is researching the teaching of creative writing in schools and how children create fiction and tell stories. In particular she is interested in how children who are looked after and accommodated can process trauma and chaotic lives through writing, what happens when they have the opportunity to control fictional worlds and characters when they have no control or choice in reality.
Defne Cizakca is working on a historical novel based in 19th Century Istanbul. Her writing focuses on the years 1839-1876, a period filled with political innovations, tensions between traditionalism and Westernisation but also a myriad of new possibilities in the social and cultural structures of the Ottoman Empire. Her story culminates in the year 1876 in which three different Sultans ruled the Ottoman lands consecutively: Sultan Abdulaziz, Sultan Murat the 5th and Sultan Abdulhamit.
The critical component of her PhD focuses on the use of public space in the coffee houses of Istanbul and in Ottoman theatre. Through charting cross cultural borrowings between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, she hopes to delineate the different ways in which public space was put to use in the Istanbul of 19th Century.
Sherezade Garcia Rangel is writing The Wounded Me, a novel that explores brotherhood, innocence, feral children and creational myth. The novel is inspired by Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel, Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and other symbolists works. This original creative work is contextualised by a literary review of Symbolist novels and an ekphrasis analysis of how the aims and practices of symbolism can inform the creative process of writing The Wounded Me. Striding aside from traditional uses of paintings as inspiration for novels, this project aims to use the paintings as points of departure for independent artistic practice.