Maral Attar-Zadeh, Trinity

Degree: PhD
Course: English
Supervisor: Dr Sophie Read
Dissertation Title:

Feeding Bodies, Mother Tongues: Maternal Nourishment and the Poetics of Social Change, 1630-1730


Biographical Information

I studied Comparative Literature, German, and History at Victoria College, University of Toronto (Hons., High Distinction) before coming to Cambridge for an MPhil in Criticism and Culture (Distinction). My master's dissertation focussed on pedagogy and/as literary criticism in the context of the so-called method debates, and was funded by a Trinity College Dunlevie King's Hall Studentship. My doctoral project, supervised by Dr Sophie Read, is broadly about the mouth: exploring the relationship between discourses of dearth and charity ("feeding the hungry") and literary education and production in the vernacular ("the mother tongue") in the early modern English imaginary. It is funded by the AHRC DTP and was awarded an honorary Cambridge Trust Doctoral Scholarship. 

Outside the PhD: I served, for a year, as the coordinator of the Northrop Frye Centre and the Jackman Humanities Scholars-in-Residence Program at the University of Toronto. I was the convenor of Music and Distributed Cognition, an interdisciplinary event series at CRASSH, in 2021-2022. From November 2023 to April 2024, I was part of the first cohort of AHRC doctoral placement students at the Victoria & Albert Museum, assisting the Architecture & Design team with research and cataloguing work for over 700 newly-acquired design drawings by A.W.N. Pugin (I spent most of this time gawking at Pugin's fine neogothic designs and his temperamental marginalia). Having received my Associate Diploma in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Canada in 2019, I dabble in amateur organ playing and composition. I have written for the Cambridge Review of Books and The Drift. 

I can be reached at ma926@cam.ac.uk. 

Research Interests

early modern poetry; psychoanalysis; religion and secularity; the apocalypse; materiality (esp. textual and culinary); maternity (esp. breastfeeding); hunger; pedagogy; masculinity; translation

Selected Publications

  • 'Apocalypse When? Two Visions of the End-Times', Apocalyptica: Journal of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies 1 (2022)
  • Review of The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England by Joshua Calhoun, Comitatus 52 (2021)