On May 20^th, 2020 Comparative Literature Doctoral student Tera Reid-Olds successfully defended her dissertation, “The Cross-Currents of Exilic Storytelling: Multilingual Memory and the Maritime Shift.” Directed by Professor Michael Allan, Reid-Olds’ study proposes a practice of reading “comparative seas” (across the Mediterranean and Caribbean) to consider how storytelling constructs a sense of belonging out of the experience of exile.

Dr. Reid-Olds has recently assumed a three-year postdoctoral teaching fellowship in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

She is author of “Mobility and Memory: Maritime Crossings of the Storyteller in Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le Livre d’Emma and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6.2 (Spring 2019).