Graduate Student, English Language and Literature
PhD Student
About
I am currently a PhD student at the University of Waterloo working towards completing my comprehensive examinations. My main area of interest is medieval cycle drama. My dissertation is entitled “Emotion and Devotion: A Cognitive Study of Conceptual Blending and Metatheatricality in the York Dramatic Cycle." My argument delineates the ways in which the York cycle simultaneously promoted affective piety (deep religious devotion brought about through emotional response) and a better understanding of biblical events.
My analysis focuses on the mimetic breaks caused by the mapping of plays from the cycle onto medieval spatio-temporal cultural realities that are recognizably consistent with their biblical referents. In the York cycle, the source domain (biblical narrative) is effectively being mapped onto the target domain (medieval reality) to create a new blended cognitive space wherein the viewers are able to realize relatedness of biblical events to their own subjective realities.
