Laura Berdikhojayeva is a researcher/writer/lyrical editor from Kazakhstan. Currently she is affiliated with Leiden University’s Institute for Area Studies where she is researching and writing her PhD dissertation about Kazakh women’s writing. Drawing inspiration from postcolonial feminist critical and literary theories, her research aims to reexamine the impact of Soviet colonial literary politics on the development of Kazakh literature. Her work specifically focuses on how Kazakh women reworked various oral and written genres as tools of resistance against the Soviet colonial and patriarchal representations. Prior to joining Leiden University, she obtained her first master’s degree in Postcolonial literature from Central University of Rajasthan (India) and her second master’s degree in Eurasian studies from Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan). Her recent article entitled “The bee-human: Imagining a new Qazaq identity in Oralkhan Bökei’s novel Atau-Kere” came out in a volume Environmental Humanities in Central Asia: Relations between Extraction and Interdependence (2023) published as a part of the Routledge Environmental Humanities Series.

Laura dreams of being able to ride a horse like her ancestors and write more creative works.