Elisa Haf obtained a BA in Modern & Medieval Languages (Spanish and German) from The University of Cambridge before going on to complete two Master's degrees: one in Critical International Politics at Aberystwyth University, and one in General & Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. As of October 2023, she is a doctoral candidate at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies, as well as a member of the "Temporal Communities" Cluster of Excellence, working within Research Area 1: "Competing Communities". Her research focuses on bisexuality in Irish women's writing since 1993.

Elisa’s dissertation compares the representation of bisexuality in the novels of four Irish women writers: Sally Rooney, Emma Donoghue, Naoise Dolan and Mary Dorcey. Aligning itself with a Felskian approach to literary analysis which is particularly interested in literature’s capacity to generate affective attachments, both towards and beyond itself, its exploration is organised around the question of how these texts make readers feel about the different sexual, relationship and lifestyle possibilities which bisexuality allows – or might allow – to be explored. It also seeks to draw out the relationship between the possibilities towards which the texts solicit affect, the kinds of affect they solicit, and the literary means by which they do so. In contextualising this analysis in light of the texts’ specifically Irish cultural background, the dissertation also problematises the homonationalist discourses which attach to the Rooney texts in particular, and seeks to complicate a straightforward ‘progress’ narrative of Irish sexual liberalisation. Identifying a contemporary trend for bisexual protagonists in anglophone women’s writing more broadly, and offering a queer, feminist critique of what might be called the dominant model of bisexual representation embodied in the Rooney texts, the dissertation draws on the work of the other writers in its corpus to argue that the literary ‘uses’ to which bisexuality may be put are as varied as the possibilities of bisexuality itself, and calls for this to be celebrated.

Conference Papers

• Tradwife Utopia: Gender and the Rejection of Technology in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You?, IASIL Annual Conference, Ollscoil na Gaillimhe - The University of Galway, July 2025 (accepted).
• 'Tell me you want me': Love as Battle for Affirmation in Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Naoise Dolan's Exciting Times, Affective Societies International Workshop, Freie Universität Berlin, 6th March 2025.
• 'Come and get me': Prizeworthiness as Mechanism of Affective Investment in Sally Rooney's Novels, EXC TC Symposium, Freie Universität Berlin, 27th Nov. 2024.
• 'Stop taking the contraceptive pill with me': Reproduction as Route (Back) to Utopia in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You? and Luiza Sauma's Everything You Ever Wanted, FSGS Annual Conference, Freie Universität Berlin, 15th Nov. 2024.

Moderation

• The Un/happy Couple: Late Capitalism & the Death of the Heterosexual Dream – a conversation with Naoise Dolan, Freie Universität Berlin, 11th July 2024.