Dr. Eftihia Mihelakis is Associate Professor in the Department of Francophone Studies and Languages (French and Francophone Studies) and affiliated to the Gender & Women’s Studies Program at Brandon University. She specializes in comparative literature (with a focus on French and Québécois texts of the 20th and 21st century), critical theory, medical humanities, and feminist theory. She is Co-Director of the Medical Humanities Research Group (with Dr. Ariane Hanemaayer and Dr. Jonathan Allan), Research Affiliate at the Centre for Critical Studies in Rural Mental Health at Brandon University and Research Affiliate at the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta.

In 2016, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary, in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures (French and Francophone Studies Section). After a PhD in comparative literature which she obtained in 2016 in which she focused on virginity, the figure of the young girl, myth and the power of literature (Sebold, Angot, Despentes, Jelinek and Eugenides), she worked on the questions of the recidivism of the real and of the law in contemporary French literature (Angot, Darrieussecq, Iacub) as well as on the writing of sexuality and the body in virtual space. Her research tries to think on the drifts of the body and of thought, about the convergence between literary and social discourse in contemporary ideas of the desert (medical, legal, community, intellectual, artistic) especially in a minority context, about hybrid writings on mental health, rurality and the environmental crisis. Currently, she is working on the literatures of depression while preparing a book-length non-fictional text on depression. She is also interested in the figure of the "feminine" heartless writer/thinker (Arendt, Gallop, Sand). Her interests showcase how the creative process engages feminist theory and the discourse held by depressive writers in the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically through non-fiction.