Fiana Kawane
English
Bio: Fiana Kawane is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities 2024-25, hosted by the Global Asia Program and affiliated with the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, at Simon Fraser University. She has an MA in English from the University of Toronto and is completing a PhD in English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia.
Fiana has taught courses on literary and scholarly approaches to modern Asia and the Americas at the UBC Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice. She worked as the editorial assistant for the Working Paper Series at the UBC Centre for Migration Studies and is part of the CMS Migration & Indigeneity research group. She is a GAA for the UBC Global History of Anticolonial Thought Cluster.
Statement: Fiana's research focuses on global Anglophone literature, environmental humanities, and Asian migration.
Her dissertation "Lyric Disunities" furnishes a fresh insight into twentieth and twenty-first century South Asian diasporic poetry on questions of lyric and ecology. By tracing the longer genealogy of lyric in its transnational form, her work engages with modernist debates on subjectivity, nature, and worlding. Her chapters trace the turns towards the global through poetic engagements with concerns such as midcentury anticolonial inheritances, post-Bandung South-South entanglements, Cold War literary innovation, and contemporary limits of the cosmopolitan.
Her SFU Shadbolt fellowship project "Storying Waterways" is an art-research inquiry into carceral histories of BC waterways and water bodies that will emerge as a public-engaged podcast and site-specific performance. The fellowship considers performance as a mode of inquiry and draws on archival research into oral histories of Asian migration and Asian Canadian experimental poetics to story the waterways that make up so-called British Columbia.
