The Polyphony is pleased to welcome three new editors to our team: Lindsey Zelvin, Arya Ray, and Adarsh Yadav. Arya and Adarsh will join as Guest Editors for the Polyphony Meets India (PMI) project and Lindsey will join the General editors team. We look forward to working with all three new editors!
You can find out more about each of the new editors below.
Lindsey Zelvin
Lindsey is a prose writer who recently submitted her practice-based PhD in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Her thesis, I Think I’ve Been Here Before: A Memoir in Fragments and Footnotes, draws on narratology, medical humanities, memoir and trauma theory in order to craft a methodology for approaching a more authentic and ethical representation of her lived experience of chronic mental illness within her own memoir. Lindsey has published articles in the Journal of Medical Humanities and Brief Encounters, the CHASE (Consortium for the Arts and Humanities South-East England) peer-reviewed, postgraduate journal. She is also a contributing author to the anthology Women Write Now: Women in Trauma (2022). Since 2022 she has served as one of the Postgraduate Representatives of the University of Kent’s Centre for Health and Medical Humanities.
As her work troubles the expectations of mental illness narratives, Lindsey would be keen to commission articles which further challenge, question, and contend with traditional narrative structures of chronic illness and disability. She is especially interested in experiences of time and embodiment. Lindsey is concerned with the intersection of medical humanities and the practices of autotheory and autoethnography, and deeply curious about the way in which these methodologies can be used to disrupt hierarchies of authority within medical situations, academia, and daily life. She would welcome pitches dealing with different approaches to gathering and disseminating knowledge within the medical humanities.
Arya Ray
Arya Ray is a literary scholar interested in ghost stories, folktales and indigenous modes of storytelling within global literatures and cultures. During his MA from Durham University, he did a comparative study of multiple editions of Frankenstein and the early gothic bluebooks of the 1770s-1820s around the themes of ‘doubling’ and ‘loving’, using methods of literary analysis, digital humanities, and life studies. Currently, he is working as a Research Assistant with the Wellcome-funded ReaderBank project, where he works with an interdisciplinary team of researchers to study experiences of reading, imagination and wellbeing. He is presently researching long-nineteenth century Bengali ghostly folklore and its relationship with European gothic through discourses of bodily monstrosity and cultural memory.
With a background in experimental theatre and music, Arya is particularly keen to publish pieces that come from perspectives of creative practice like visual and performance art, including various modes of storytelling of experiences of illness. He is interested in recovering the narratives that fall through the schisms created by barriers language, academia and disciplines owing to the multicultural and diverse sociocultural landscapes of South Asia.
Adarsh Yadav
Adarsh Yadav is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. Her research is funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Doctoral College, University of Exeter. Her PhD research explores care work through an exploration of illness, bodies, and mental health through contemporary Indian literature. She is particularly interested in critical caste studies, migration studies, and feminist studies. She is keen on receiving pitches that can expand our understanding of health, care, illness and bodies through marginalised and minoritised perspectives from India and the diaspora. She is also interested in working with scholars, thinkers, artists, grassroots activists, and researchers who are troubling “India” as a socio-political framework for understanding health and are interested in creating local, transnational and other forms of associations. The pitches can be in different mediums and formats.
If you want to work with them on a contribution to The Polyphony, please contact them via our Team page.
