Maral Aguilera-Moradipour

Areas of interest

Maral Aguilera-Moradipour is an Assistant Professor of Asian refugee literatures and cultures in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and the Global Asia Program. Developing her research at the intersections of Asian, diaspora, and Indigenous literary and cultural studies, she foregrounds the importance of place-based concepts that emerge from such rich and diverse epistemologies and ontologies.

Education

• 2022 to 2024 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Toronto Scarborough, Department of Arts, Culture and Media
• 2015 to 2020 PhD, Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University
• 2009 to 2010 Master of Arts, English Literature, York University, Toronto, ON                   
• 2006 Bachelor of Science, Honours, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON

Biography

Maral Aguilera-Moradipour is an assistant professor in Asian refugee literatures and cultures. After completing her PhD at the University of Western Ontario in English Literature and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in Media Studies, she joined Simon Fraser University in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and the Global Asia Program where she is also affiliate faculty of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies. Maral is also a member of the advisory board of the interdisciplinary Critical Refugee and Migration Studies network of Canada. Her research brings together critical refugee studies and Global Asia perspectives for understanding the literary and visual cultures of southwest and southeast Asian refugees—two regions where refugee-making has resulted from the Global North’s violent interventions in Asia. She is particularly interested in how refugee art undermines settler-colonial national narratives in solidarity with Indigenous resistance. Developing her research at the intersections of Asian, diaspora, and Indigenous literary and cultural studies, she foregrounds the importance of place-based concepts that emerge from such rich and diverse epistemologies and ontologies. Her publications include: “Sufi Stargazing and Relationality: Constellating Refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West” in Postcolonial Text; “Constellational Visions: International Configurations of Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi” in Papers of the Fifty-First Algonquian Conference, and “Celestial and Terrestrial Constellations: Relationality and Migration in Rebecca Belmore’s Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside)” in English Studies in Canada for which she won the F. E. L. Priestly Prize.