Maria Ioana Zirra Postdoctoral researcher

Maria Zirra is a postdoctoral researcher at the English Department of Stockholm University and the Department of Literatures in English at Rhodes University. Her current postdoctoral research project, “Reading Art Worlds in Small Print: Prismatic Combinations of Literature and Visual Art in South African Little Magazines from the 1960s-1970s” is funded by the Swedish Research Council and it focuses on visual artist and writer collaborations in periodicals from Southern Africa. Maria’s upcoming monograph “Visual Poetic Memory: Ekphrasis and Image-Text in Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Wopko Jensma” deals with postcolonial poetic writing about visual art and its aesthetic, political and material implications. She has published work on contemporary ekphrastic poetry, new materialism, multidirectional memory and complicity in Anglophone poetry.