Biography

Ghazal Nessari Poortak (She/Her) is an international Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Rhode Island. She specializes in Memory Studies and its reflection in contemporary literature. Ghazal is deeply passionate about Interdisciplinary research and her work often borrows from other disciplines such as Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Currently, her research focuses on the phenomenology of imagination and memory, in particular, the treatment of memory as a creative faculty in contemporary Irish and American literature.

Additionally, she takes pleasure in investigating the entanglements of subjectivity and memory. Her research has been internationally acknowledged at conferences, such as the International Conference of the Spanish Association of Irish Studies (AEDEI), Issues in Philosophy of Memory Conference (IPM3), Association of Franco-Irish Studies (AFIS) Conference, and Memory Studies Association (MSA) Conference. At URI, Ghazal serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and English Department Senator for the Graduate Student Association. Ghazal has an extensive teaching background. She earned her Teaching Training Certificate from Kish Institute of Science and Technology in 2016 and started teaching English as a Second Language at only eighteen. She has been teaching ever since.