Projects
Waking Prithviraj: the subversive poetics of the past in North Indian historical literature Ghent University
Complementing and challenging a dominant historiographical and socio-political mode of textual analysis, this project offers a first and much-needed literary/aesthetic reappraisal of an important Sanskrit historical epic poem, Jayanaka’s long-neglected Pṛthvīrājavijaya “Prithviraj’s Victory” (1192-3). This epic stands at the beginning of a long and ongoing tradition of heroic and unheroic retellings about the (in)famous North Indian king ...
Language and Literature Teaching in the Sixteenth Century: Vergil and Homer at the Leuven Collegium Trilingue KU Leuven
During the Renaissance, humanist thought provoked great changes in school curricula across Europe. Latin and Greek language and literature were taught in a new way, classical writers were read in a different fashion. Whereas these new humanist pedagogical practices have been studied in some detail on a general level, especially with regard to Italy, they remain almost unstudied for the Southern Low Countries. For this reason I envisage to ...
Literature that bypassed the censor! The alternative literary circuit in Antwerp at the end of the seventeenth century. University of Antwerp
Beyond Petroleum. Reimagining Energy in Contemporary Film and Literature Ghent University
Like climate change, the shift to alternative energy sources is not just a technological challenge but a cultural issue too, necessitating a rethinking of dominant values, narratives and cultural ideas. One important development is the emergence of the ‘energy humanities’, a subfield that examines how cultural artefacts like movies and literary texts reflect on particular sources and uses of energy. Upon closer inspection, however, the field ...
Innovations in Methodologies and Syllabus: Digital Humanities and Philippine Literature (DigiPhiLit) University of Antwerp
Literature and media innovation: the question of genre transformations (LMI) Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Older discussions treat the taxonomy of genres as well as the nature of literary ...
On the crossroads of literature and science. The essayist and the scientific field in Huxley, Ortega y Gasset and KU Leuven
The general aim of this thesis is to provide a study of the interdiscursive relations (Maingueneau 2004) between literature and science during the period of 1900-1950. More specifically we will study these interactions within the essayistic work of three writers – Paul Valéry (1871-1945), José Ortega y Gasset (1873-1955) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) – whose fascination with science has often been analyzed in the past (Robinson-Valéry 1983; ...
Rewriting Anthropocene Aesthetics: A Rhetorical and Narratological Analysis of the Sublime in Contemporary U.S. Literature KU Leuven
The main goal of this project is to explore the rhetorical and aesthetic affordances and limits of the sublime for figuring modes of materiality and (non-)human agency in contemporary U.S. literature. Because the sublime has a particularly contested literary and cultural history in the USA, where the “American Sublime” has been entangled with problematic notions such as the wilderness, the frontier, and technology, this project offers close ...
Biofictions of Border-Crossing: A World Literature for Outsiders KU Leuven
Following recent developments in the growing field of biofiction studies, this project analyses biographical novels with a social justice component from the perspective of World Literature. The selected corpus includes recent novels set in all continents and in various historical periods, allowing me to map the world-span of contemporary biofiction and its figuration of the dimension of deep time. While all these texts thematize ...