Profile

My name is Nanthanoot Udomlamun. I completed my doctoral study at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in June 2014. I graduated with a BA in English at Silpakorn University and an MA in English (Literature) at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. I had taught English language and literature modules at Srinakharinwirot University in Bangkok for four years before having been awarded the Royal Thai Government PhD Scholarship (under the Office of Higher Education Commission) to pursue my doctoral degree at University of Warwick.

My Research

The title of my thesis is "Materiality and Memory in Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Literature".

My thesis is a materialist study of memory in contemporary writings. Situating itself in the emergent field of memory studies, this thesis is an attempt to go beyond the stretched horizon of traumatic recollection that is commonly regarded as part of contemporary postcolonial and diasporic experience. Apparently, in the contemporary world the geographical mapping and remapping and its concomitant sense of displacement and the crisis of identity have become an integral part of an everyday life of not only the post-colonial subjects, but also the post-apartheid ones. This interconnectedness between memory, place, and displacement as an outcome of colonisation, migration and the apartheid lays conceptual background for my study of memory in the literary works of four contemporary writers, namely Jhumpa Lahiri, Monique Truong, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ivan Vladislavić. In order to restore the sense of place and identity to the displaced people, it may be necessary to critically engage in a study of embodied memory which is represented by the material place of memory - the brain and the body - and other objects of remembrance. This study is a scrutiny, through modernist views, of some key issues in memory studies: the working of remembrance and forgetting, the materialisation of memory, and the commoditisation of material memory. My study engages with critical and theoretical ideas from multi-disciplinary scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Andreas Huyssen, Siegfried Kracauer, Pierre Nora, Paul Ricoeur, to name but a few.

Supervisor: Professor Neil Lazarus

Mentor: Professor Michael Gardiner

Conferences:

'The Work of Memory and the Memory of Work: Conceptualising Labour and Memory in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt', EACLALS Postgraduate Conference "Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights", Institute of English Studies, University of London, 26-27 August 2011

"The Memorialization of the City and the Materialization of Urban Memories through Creative Works in Ivan Vladislavić’s Recent Writings", Writing South Africa Now: A Colloquium, English Faculty, University of Cambridge, 2 July 2013

Nanthanoot Udomlamun

N dot Udomlamun at warwick dot ac dot uk