Zhila Gholami earned her Ph.D. in literature from Griffith University and is Adjunct Member of the Griffith Centre for Cultural and Social Research. Her research interests include postcolonial and diaspora literature, witness literature, memory and post-memory studies, refugee narratives, and art activism. Gholami’s work has appeared in Continuum, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Art + Australia. She was 2024 Fryer Fellow at the University of Queensland (UQ), where she studied a unique archive of letters written by refugees detained on Nauru between 2001 and 2005. She is currently Casual Academic in UQ’s School of Communication and Arts, teaching contemporary literature. She is also Recipient of the John Oxley Fellowship 2025 at the State Library of Queensland, where she is documenting and preserving stories of refugee experiences and highlighting their cultural and social contributions to Queensland society.