Dr Kasia Mika-Bresolin , PhD

Profile

I am a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature. 

Prior to that, I was a Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and held a postdoc fellowship at KITLV (The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) in Comparative Caribbean Studies. I obtained my PhD from the University of Leeds and MLitt and MA from the University of Aberdeen.

My current research projects are anchored in my earlier work in environmental and medical humanities and focus on loss, healing and repair (or lack thereof) in contexts where violence and crisis seems ordinary.

These range from Caribbean fossil modernity, death and disappearances at the Polish-Belarusian border, work of mourning without a body, edited special issue on
Island Sound Scales. Working Towards Aural Ecocriticism (with Christina Kullberg), and a funded collaborative project on reparative approaches to health humanities (with Shital Pravinchandra, Meg Clinch, Sara Paparini, and Dr Adonna Francis, GP).

My broader research and teaching focus on topics that are socially and politically urgent with crisis, vulnerability, justice and futures being key to my pedagogy and my wider work in disaster studies, medical and environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. I work across literature, film, and visual art and see creativity and imagination as central to the how we make sense of the world around us. 

My monograph, Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti’s Futures (Routledge 2019) uses narrative responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a starting point for an analysis of notions of disaster, vulnerability, reconstruction and recovery. In my analysis, I turn to concepts of hinged chronologies, slow healing, and remnant dwelling, offering a vision of open-ended Caribbean futures, full of resolve.

Building on this work,  produced an award-winning short documentary, Intranqu’îllités (dir. Ed Owles; 2019; full film available on Aeon), on art and creativity in Haiti (filmed on site) which won the AHRC Research in Film Award (2019), and the Creative Activism Award, Social Impact Media Awards.

Teaching

My seminars are all about working and reading together towards a better, more critical understanding of the world around us. All courses I teach are rooted in an inclusive dialogue and encourage everyone to participate and learn from each other.

“Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?’  (Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed 2000:90)

I teach across all UG levels, convene the iBSc in Global Medical Humanities and contribute to the University of London’s intercollegiate MA in Languages and Cultures Across Borders.  

I welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduate research on postcolonial environmental and medical humanities, disaster studies, Caribbean and island studies, comparative approaches to Central and Eastern European studies, intersection of comparative literature and anthropology, among others. 

Research

Research Interests:

Environmental humanities; disaster studies; Haitian and Caribbean studies; postcolonial and critical theory; critical pedagogy

Publications

Monograph:

Mika, Kasia, Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti’s Futures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019)

Film:

Intranqu’îllités (2019) (dir. Ed Owles;  prod: Kasia Mika) (2019) ; full film available on Aeon, winner of the AHRC Research in Film Award (2019), and the Creative Activism Award, Social Impact Media Awards.

Refereed Chapters: 

Mika, Kasia and Ilan Kelman, ‘Vulnerable Anthropocenes? Towards an integrated approach,’ in Why Vulnerability Still Matters: The Politics of Disaster Risk Creation, ed. by Greg Bankoff and Dorothea Hilhorst (Routledge 2022), pp. 206-22. https://www.routledge.com/Why-Vulnerability-Still-Matters-The-Politics-of-Disaster-Risk-Creation/Bankoff-Hilhorst/p/book/9781032113432

Mika, Kasia and Sally Stainier, ‘Refashioning futures with the Sargassum: Caribbean poetics of hope’, in Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change, ed. by Russell McDougall (Brill 2022), pp. 192-218. https://brill.com/view/title/62195

Mika, K., Diamanti, J., Nesbitt, N., Valdivia, P. (2021). Critique Under Duress. In: Boletsi, M., Lemos Dekker, N., Mika, K., Robbe, K. (eds) (Un)timely Crises. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74946-0_5

Mika Kasia, Boletsi Maria, Robbe Ksenia, Lemos Dekker Natashe, ‘Epilogue: The Ends of Crisis’, in (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique ed. by Maria Boletsi, Kasia Mika Natashe Lemos Dekker and Ksenia Robbe (Palgrave: 2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74946-0_6

Mika, Kasia, ‘A Dark Journey through the Debris: Inside Disaster: Haiti (2011) and Post-Earthquake Online Simulations,’ in Ghost Roads: Essays in Virtual Dark Tourism, ed. by Kathryn McDaniel (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_11>

Refereed Articles:

Mika, Kasia-Bresolin, ‘Caribbean fossil modernity and thresholds of life in the Plastipelagos,’ Environmental Humanities [in press]

Mika, Kasia-Bresolin, ‘“I live, as we all live, in the aftermath:" grief without a body and mourning poiesis in the works of Hisham Matar and Diana Matar,’ Contemporary Literature, 66 (3) 2025, 364-397. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983638.

Mason, Richard and Kasia Mika-Bresolin, ‘Difficulty's Knots: Disturbance, Untimeliness, Risk,’’ Paragraph, 47 (1) (2024), 1-11, https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2024.0447

Mika-Bresolin, Kasia, ‘Difficult Opacity: On Reading Difference,’ Paragraph, 47 (1) (2024), 12-27. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/para.2024.0448

Mika-Bresolin, Kasia, ‘‘Culture is What Preserves Difficulty’: An Interview with Zena Hitz,”’ Paragraph, 47 (1) (2024), 108-122, https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2024.0454

Mika, Kasia, ‘Sensing History, Seeking Justice: Affect, Solidarity and Wake Work in Sasha Huber’s Shooting Back and Haïti Chérie’,  Third Text, 36(6) (2022), 559–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2022.2147689

—, ‘Documenting hurt: UN, epistemic injustice, and the political ecology of the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti,’ Modern & Contemporary France: Environmental Humanities, 29 (2020), 209-226, <https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2020.1810646>

Mika, Kasia and Ilan Kelman, ‘Shealing: Post-disaster slow healing and later recovery,’ Area Journal, 52 (2020), 646-653 < https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12605>  

Mika, Kasia, ‘New Beginnings without New Heroes? 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution and the 2010 Earthquake in Nick Lake’s In Darkness (2012)’, Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 4 (2018) <http://doi.org/10.16993/karib.45>

——, ‘Histories of the Past, Histories for the Future: Representing the Past and Writing for the Future in Rodney Saint-Éloi's Haïti, kenbe la!’, Journal of Haitian Studies, 20 (2014), 4-19, 10.1353/jhs.2014.0022

   ——, ‘Recovery Foreclosed: History, Landscape, and Personal Intervention in Sandra Marquez Stathis’s Rubble: The Search for a Haitian Boy’, Moving Worlds: Catastrophe and Environment, 14 (2014), 93-108

Mika, Kasia, ‘Mosaic of Ashes: Poetic Responses to 9/11’, Aspeers: Emerging Voices in American Studies, 6 (2013), 85-108. https://www.aspeers.com/sites/default/files/pdf
/Mosaic%20of%20Ashes%2085-108.pdf