Kateryna Kruhliakova

Kateryna Kruhliakova  holds a degree in Germanic Languages and Literatures, specialising in English and with additional training in translation, from Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine, 2025). During the autumn semester of the 2024/2025 academic year, she participated in the Erasmus exchange programme at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), where she subsequently completed a Master’s degree in Advanced English Studies and its Applications (2026).

She is currently developing her doctoral thesis under the supervision of professors Margarita Estévez-Saá and Manuela Palacios González. Her research, provisionally titled “Rethinking the Human in Contemporary Irish Fiction,” examines how contemporary Irish novels engage with and negotiate transhumanist ideals of human enhancement, technological mastery, and individual autonomy. Drawing on critical posthumanism and feminist theory, the project investigates how literary representations of bodily vulnerability, human–non-human relationships, and attempts to control the natural world complicate conventional understandings of human progress and open up alternative perspectives on human flourishing.

Her research interests include contemporary Irish literature and culture, critical posthumanism, feminist literary criticism, and ecocriticism, with a particular focus on the intersections of literature, technology, embodiment, and the environment.