About

Kirsten Bussière is a doctoral candidate whose SSHRC-funded research analyses what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the chronotope, or the ways that literature represents time and space, in post-apocalyptic fiction. In her dissertation, she examines the ways that different forms of collective memory emerge in response to disaster, which ultimately exposes tensions between nostalgic longing for the past and the development of progressive new futures. Since this genre offers a unique temporal perspective, which reframes our real-world present as the recent past, this project intends to serve as a critical intervention where we can re-examine our current precarious position in a novel way.