Viral Conjunctures Members
Principal Investigator
Heike Härting
Associate Professor
Heike Härting is Associate Professor of English in the Départment de littératures et des langues du monde, founder and co-director of the Centre de recherche des études littéraires et culturelles sur la planétarité (Research Centre on Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies) at Université de Montréal (Canada). She focuses on multidisciplinary and collaborative research with a specific emphasis on the intersections of postcolonial studies, narratives of global and gender-based violence, and planetary health in African and Canadian literatures and art. Her present SSHRC-funded research, "Viral Conjunctures," explores pandemic and planetary health narratives in different geopolitical settings. Her recent publications include a co-edited special issue of transtext(e)s transcultures on “Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now” (with Johannes Riquet, 2023) and a book on Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (co-edited with Heather Meek, Routledge, 2024). Her current book project Sexing the Planet. Planetary Health, Reproductive Justice, and the Decolonial Imaginantion is under contract with Palgrave Mcmillan.
Members
Parham Aledavood
PhD Candidate
Parham Aledavood is an FRQ-funded PhD candidate in Literature and Digital Humanities at the Université de Montréal. His writings have appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Digital Studies / Le champ numérique. Bringing together postcolonial theory, planetary studies, and digital humanities, his current research focuses on a computational analysis of trauma in contemporary migration novels. Moreover, he studies the the viral spread of digital methodology in literary studies. As of September 2024, he is the associate director of Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). At the same time, he represents the Université de Montréal and DHSI at the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities (cc:DH/HN) and serves as a graduate representative at the Canadian Society of Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN).
Patrick Aura
PhD Candidate
Patrick Aura is a PhD candidate at the Université de Montréal specialized in Canadian and Indigenous literature. His thesis explores the intersection of early 20th century Canadian and Indigenous literatures with environmental studies, and history. His publications and presentations have also addressed such topics as science fiction, comic books, media studies, and historiographic metafiction. He writes poetry in his spare time, some of which has been published.
Camille Houle-Eichel
PhD Candidate
Camille Houle-Eichel is a PhD candidate at the University of Montreal who specializes in postcolonial, feminist and planetary studies. She is currently working on her thesis, which interrogates metaphors of eating in illness narratives. She has presented creative work about living with endometriosis as well academic work exploring chronic conditions in Indigenous and African literatures.
Victoria Lupascu
Assistant Professor
Victoria Lupascu is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her work explores how writers, directors and artists engage with and produce visual and medical narratives to unveil hidden histories of cultural, economic and social disposability. Her training focuses on 20th and 21st century Chinese, Romanian and Brazilian literature and film, medical humanities and visual culture, with additional interests in Francophone graphic narratives of postpartum depression and mental ill-health.
Heather Meek
Associate Professor
Heather Meek is a Professor of English at Université de Montréal. Her most recent publications include a monograph, Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and a collection of essays, co-edited with Heike Härting, titled Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (Routledge).
Eftihia Mihelakis
Writer and Professor
Eftihia Mihelakis is a writer and professor of literature and feminist theory. She co-edited the volume Embodied Narratives in Literary Studies and Health Humanities (University of Toronto Press, 2025). In 2017, she published La Virginité en question, ou les jeunes filles sans âge (Presses de l’Université de Montréal). In 2020, she co-authored the essay-dialogue J'enseigne depuis toujours (Nota bene). Her articles have appeared in the journals Romanica Cracoviensia, Tangence, Captures, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites . She has edited many special issues, including for the Journal of Medical Humanities, Analyses, and Tangence . Her first poetry collection, Oύτις / Nobody / Personne , was published by Les Herbes rouges in 2026.
Shane Neilson
Poet and Physician
Shane Neilson is a poet and physician from New Brunswick. He published Carelanding: Canadian Literature and Medicine with Routledge in 2023. He is currently serving as a judge for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and later this year he will publish The Reign with Goose Lane Editions.
Kayla Penteliuk
Postdoctoral Fellow
Kayla Penteliuk is a Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal. She received her Ph.D. in English at McGill University, and her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Saskatchewan. Her work has appeared in Studies in the Novel, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, the Victorian Network, the Literary Review of Canada, The Ex-Puritan, and an edited collection from the University of Alberta Press titled Shelter in Text. She researches literature of the long nineteenth century through the lens of witchcraft, cunning folk, and the occult, and is currently writing a book on literary representations of witches in twentieth-century Britain.
Cecily Raynor
Associate Professor
Cecily Raynor is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University, where she is Chair-Elect. Her research spans Latin American cultural studies, digital humanities, and health and environmental humanities. Her current project, Pandemic Imaginaries, examines cultural responses to recent public health crises in Latin America, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Zika virus, AIDS, and yellow fever.