Ricky Varghese is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice in Education at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie at the intersection of aesthetic theory, the history of art, visual studies, film theory, and trauma and memory studies. He is presently working on a dissertation project that attempts to explore how the aesthetic representation of the architectural trope of the ruin relates to the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning, melancholia, and fetishism.