Diana Filar
Currently, I am deep into my dissertation, a study of 21st-century immigrant fiction from a range of global contexts, situated at the intersection of multi-ethnic literature, migration studies, and onomastics (the study of names and naming). I show how, in many fictional texts written by immigrants about the immigrant 
experience, characters often define and redefine their relationships to dominant narratives about immigration by questioning their names, developing new names, and ruminating on the naming traditions of their countries of origin and of their adopted cultures. Naming appears across these diverse texts—by writers like NoViolet Bulawayo, Christina Henriquez, Karolina Waclawiak, Nafkote Tamirat, Erika Sanchez, and Anya Ulinich among others—and functions as an act of claiming citizenship.
I've been interested in immigrant writing for a long time, even composing my own semi-autobiographical immigrant stories as an undergraduate. The more specific idea of focusing on naming within these contemporary novels emerged out of a seminar paper on Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names for Professor Irr's Capitalist Novel course -- and then, while reading for my field exam, I started noticing an obsession with naming everywhere. I have learned a lot since starting research on the project, the most unfamiliar to me being the scholarship on onomastics, the study of names and naming. But by far, the most fascinatingly irrelevant fact I learned after going down a bit of a research rabbit hole is that Pomeranian dogs get their names from Pomeria, a region on the southern shore of the Baltic sea, shared by Germany and Poland, a word that comes from "po morze" the Polish term for "by the sea."