Panni Szűcs is a Ph.D student at the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. She received her Master double degree in Communication and Hungarian Literature at University of Szeged in her home country, Hungary. After graduating, she won the Taiwanese Huayu Enrichment Scholarship to learn Chinese in Taiwan and later to obtain another Bachelor degree in English at the National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her field is Native American Literature. While working on her dissertation, Szűcs is currently a part-time lecturer in two prominent Taiwanese universities.

Native Agency in Contemporary Native American Women's Writings

Panni Szűcs’s research focuses on Native agency in contemporary Native American women's writings. She examines representative literary works from well-known Native female authors, such as Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Susan Power, and Linda LeGarde Grover, who strategically use strong Indian female characters in their works that are able to preserve tribal knowledge, build and heal their community, oppose Euro-American authority, protect the land and continue traditions through tribal practices, such as songs, stories and ceremonies. These female writers, and through them, their heroines as well, succeed in creating a very unique Native female identity. How do they construct this female identity in their works? What does it mean to be an Indian woman? Where does Nativeness come from? Is communal identity or individuality more important? Is Native female agency represented in a generalized way in these works or is there diversity in Indian women’s individual experiences of identity formation? Szűcs’s dissertation will explore these questions as well as the actions and the driving force behind the actions these women take in order to construct identity through land, nature, traditions and community.