Maral Aguilera-Moradipour

Areas of Interest

critical refugee studies; cultural studies; digital humanities; diasporic literature and theory; Indigenous literature and thought; and critical race and gender studies

Education

PhD Western

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Asian refugee literatures and cultures in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and the Global Asia Program. After completing my PhD at Western University in English Language and Literature and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in Media Studies, I joined Simon Fraser University in 2024.

My research interests include critical refugee studies; cultural studies; digital humanities; diasporic literature and theory; Indigenous literature and thought; and critical race and gender studies. My research brings together critical refugee studies and Global Asia perspectives for understanding the literary and visual cultures of southeast and southwest Asian refugees—two regions where refugee-making has resulted from the Global North’s proxy wars in Asia. I am particularly interested in how refugee art undermines settler-colonial national narratives in solidarity with Indigenous resistance. Developing my research at the intersections of Asian, diaspora, and Indigenous literary and cultural studies, I foreground the importance of place-based concepts that emerge from such rich and diverse epistemologies and ontologies.

I have published in literary and academic journals such as English Studies in Canada (ESC), Postcolonial Text, and Papers of the Fifty-First Algonquian Conference. I am also a member of the advisory board of the Critical Refugee and Migration Studies network—an interdisciplinary collective of scholars engaged in critical refugee and migration studies in Canada.