Dominic O'Key

Dominic O'Key

PhD candidate in Comparative Literature


Summary: Comparative Literature; W. G. Sebald; J. M. Coetzee; Critical Theory; Critical Animal Studies; critical veganism; the creaturely; cosmopolitanism

My research examines different modes of the creaturely in W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee.
I am supervised by Prof Stuart Taberner and Dr Sam Durrant. I am affiliated with Prof Taberner's Leverhulme Trust Major Research Project "Traumatic Pasts, Cosmopolitanism, and Nation-Building in Contemporary German and South African Literature".
My PhD research is fully funded by the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies' Doctoral College of the Arts, and I mentor first year undergraduates on the English and Comparative Literature degree programme.
I am co-convener of the School of English's Creaturely Life reading group and will direct the interdisciplinary critical theory group, Quilting Points, in 2016/17.
I have presented original research on both literature and cinema at conferences including the University of Sheffield's Reading Animals (2014), the University of Cumbria's Visualising the Animal (2015), Universität Kassel's Animal Biographies (2016), and Universiteit Gent's Questions of Scale in Contemporary Literature (2016). In October 2015 I was invited to the University of Manchester to present on Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. You can listen to this paper here.

Publications 

'The First Need: Hunger in Jan Nemec's Diamonds of the Night', Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol. 7 (2016)
Find my Academia profile here.