Projects
Literature, Nature, and Ecology: An Ecopoetic Approach to Contemporary French, Germanophone, Anglophone, and Italian Narrative Prose Ghent University
The project entails an ecopoetic inquiry into literary fiction on nature and ecology as a transcultural problem area within four interacting cultural regions (French, Germanophone, Anglophone, Italian). Central to this text-oriented approach are (1) the role of the literary imagination, (2) the focus on textual complexity (rhetoric) and (3) the ten-sion between the global nature of the problem and culture-bound issues.
Narrative, Metaphor and Metamorphosis: The Environmental Potential of Contemporary Children’s Literature Ghent University
This project, where children’s literature studies, ecocriticism and cognitive criticism intersect, investigates on both the macro-level of narrative and the micro-level of style how children’s literature responds to the imaginative challenges brought on by the Anthropocene. Understanding the environmental potential of children’s literature contributes to a better understanding of the complex intergenerational challenges (i.e. climate change) ...
RELIGION AND IMAGINATION: ISLAM AND CONTEMPORARY WORLD LITERATURE KU Leuven
Islam and contemporary world literature KU Leuven
This is the provisional title of a research monograph under contract with Edinburgh University Press. The project seeks to demonstrate how religious referents related to Islam and the Muslim world in literary writings by authors from both Muslim and non- Muslim backgrounds can be employed as a finely mazed instrument for analyzing cultural- religious belongings, grounded in individualized interpretations of Islam. This project was conceived ...
Positioning Rebecca Brown's work within contemporary English literature. University of Antwerp
The presence of U+201CletteredU+201D memory and the literary history of the present in the U+201Ccabinets des lettrésU+201D of contemporary French literature Ghent University
Academic approaches of the narrative prose of contemporary French authors such as Quignard, Macé, Michon, Bergounioux and Puech usually stress the erudition of these writers, highlighting their continued interaction with the (French) literary tradition and the critical-theoretical canon. Via textual as well as contextual analysis, this research aims to determine to what extent the writers themselves consent and/or conform to this particular ...
Language prohibitions as traumatic experience in contemporary Swedish and Danish literature and film Ghent University
The research project examines the literary and cinematic representation of traumatic experiences of children belonging to a national minority in Sweden and Denmark, who were forbidden to speak in their own mother tongue long into the 1950s. With reference to recent Postcolonial Studies and Memory and Media Studies it is to be analysed how the “colonial” past in Scandinavia is remembered and discussed today and which role literature and film ...
'It's Some Kind Of Magic': Exploring the usefulness of the term 'Magical Realism' for contemporary arabic literature Ghent University
By a close reading of six Arabophone novels that originate from diverse geographical, cultural and religious settings, this project investigates to what extent magical realism's genre theory, mainly based on Latin-American examples, offers a fruitful framework for analyzing Arabic novels that are considered magical realist, and whether this framework needs to be adapted to the specific local context.
Read 2.0. A practice-oriented literature study on an effective, contemporary reading comprehension method Ghent University
Following the results of PIRLS 2016 and the decrease of the comprehension reading level of Flemish four-tier students between 2006 and 2016, many questions arise about comprehension of reading didactics. A lot of research has already been done and compiled into reading comprehension. A number of outstanding, current and future-oriented questions can be answered through a new review. These questions concern, among other things, the growing ...