Women who Kill: The Female Serial Killer in the global novel

CCLPS Early Career Researchers Seminar Series

Location: room C325 (SOAS College Building) or Teams.

Speaker: Dr Keya Anjaria, SOAS

Abstract

This talk will explore two female serial killer novels Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My sister, the Serial Killer (2017) and Perihan Mağden’s novel, Biz Kimden Kaçıyorduk, Anne? (2007). Written in two different languages and with no critical or academic literature linking them, this pairing seems both unlikely and yet, when focusing on their thematic similarities, obvious.  From this starting point, this talk will begin to explore a framework for working with these two novels, based in, but also moving beyond, the frames of crime fiction and world literature.  Drawing additionally from scholarship on true crime and gender studies, the talk hypothesizes that the female serial killer is a manifestation of feminist and abolitionist thinking, that violently disrupts ‘polite society’ and our readerly expectations of the novel.

About the speaker

Keya Anjaria is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature and the Chair of the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies.  Keya works on Turkish literature, Anglophone global novel and comparative literature. Her most recent publication examined the multilingual composition of the late-Ottoman novel. Alongside this new project on serial killers, Keya is researching affectation and emotion in post-colonial British and Turkish television.

Image: Bangsal Nam (Unsplash)