Graduate Research Colloquium Series

Asaf Roth is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at Penn. His dissertation topic, which lies in the intersection of Classical Reception Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and French and English, examines the reception of Platonic homoeroticism in Francophone and Anglophone texts written within and outside of academia throughout the 20th century. Asaf's presentation is entitled, Remodeling Homosexuality: André Gide's Ancient Greek Paiderastia.

Mira Phillips (she/her) is a PhD candidate at SP2. Her research interests lie at the intersections of migration, labor, and social reproduction, with a particular focus on racialized immigrant women. Using ethnographic methods and grounded theory, her dissertation explores how racialized immigrant women working in Toronto’s immigrant and refugee serving sector experience precarity spatially and temporally. Her dissertation is supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s Presidential PhD Fellowship and the Penn Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Immigration Turner Schulman Graduate Research Fellowship. 

Mira is also a Senior Research Fellow at Penn’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, where she has led analysis for unconditional cash pilots involving caregivers and mixed-documentation status families in the U.S. Mira holds an MSc in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto.

Mira will be presenting a chapter from her dissertation project which examines the care labor of racialized immigrant women working in Toronto’s immigrant and refugee serving sector. The chapter, tentatively titled Negotiating Temporal Constraint in Immigrant and Refugee Services, demonstrates the exigencies created for both workers and their clients because of neoliberal conceptions of working time and productivity, and the positioning of care as counter to the market. Workers attempted to resist these constraints and provide clients with support which was more reflective of the fluid and non-linear nature of care, but opined the toll it took on their physical and mental well-being.