Liisa Merivuori is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests include contemporary trauma fiction, minority narratives, feminist literature studies, intersectionality, and narrative hermeneutics. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation entitled Stories Pierced by Trauma: Intersectional Trauma Narratives in Contemporary Literature, which focuses on how novels in three languages (English, German, Finnish) narrate different traumatic experiences and memories related to social injustices and discrimination.

In my doctoral dissertation I study how different types of trauma are described in modern literature and how trauma fiction can help us readers understand the private and cultural traumas of our own reality. I focus on how several traumas that intersect with each other affect the characters, and especially their narrative identities, in my subject novels. The novels I study include Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel) by Herta Müller, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Hävitys. Tapauskertomus (“Destruction. A case study”) by Iida Rauma.

My goal is to join together intersectional trauma studies and narrative hermeneutics, and thereby create a strong theoretical background through which it is possible to inspect trauma as a part of both a novel as a whole and of a character inside a work of fiction. Combining two separate fields of study allows me to bring forth new sides of both those theoretical fields and also the novels I study through them. My dissertation will add into the field of literary trauma studies a more intersectional way to read trauma fiction and analyze the effects trauma has on narrative identity.

My doctoral research is funded by Kone Foundation.