Ariana Serafinceanu

Ariana Serafinceanu is a 2nd-year postgraduate researcher in the School of Modern Languages pursuing a full-time PhD in Comparative Literature. Her current working title for her thesis is ‘Writing the Abortee: Reinventing Identities in 21st-century Autobiographical Abortion Narratives in English, Spanish, and Romanian’. The project is an interdisciplinary, multi-lingual, and cross-cultural exploration of discursive identity construction through language and text in contemporary autobiographical narratives of abortion experiences. Providing an in-depth, comparative study of narratives of abortion since 2000, across different cultural and sociopolitical contexts, this project critically documents the multi-faceted impacts of public discourse on knowledge, of abortion on identity, and on writing as a tool of agential self-renewal.

• Latin American Boom (1960s-1980s) and contemporary Latin American literature
• Latin American women's literature
• Women's collective writing practices
• Auto-fiction
• Women's life-writing and travel writing
• Philosophy of language and discourse theory
• Deconstructionism
• Translation theory
• Posthumanism 
• Abortion Studies
• Motherhood Studies
• Discursive identity formation and Intersectionality
• Reproductive Justice
• Literatures of oppression
• Medical Humanities

• Medical Ethics Tutor at the Unversity of St Andrews School of Medicine, leading small group tutorials for undergraduate students in their first, second, and third years. Topics include patient narratives, global health, and transcultural practices.
• Workshop Lead as part of IELLI's (International Educational and Lifelong Learning Institute) Academic Skills Project, aimed at consolidating first- and second-year students' knowledge of essay-writing techniques, referencing, and dissertation writing, among others.

Ariana grew up in Bucharest, Romania, before moving to Scotland at the age of fourteen. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford (2019–2022). In 2024, she was awarded a Master of Letters in Comparative Literature from the University of St Andrews, graduating with a Distinction. Her PhD is supervised by Dr Katie Jones (French and Comparative Literature), Dr Elise Hugueny-Léger (French), and Dr Liliana Chávez Díaz (Spanish and Comparative Literature).