Projects
Rethinking Peripheral Symphonism: Transcultural Form and Glocal Modernism at the Fin de Siècle KU Leuven
My proposed project is the first large-scale study of early global musical modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on the peripheral symphonies by travelling composers that fall outside of the Austro-German orientated European canon. This study suggests that such music displays a long neglected transcultural modernist style that integrates the prevailing cosmopolitan and nationalist idioms, a quality which reflects the ...
Physiognomic culture in popular performance: on the use of stereo-'types' in fin-de-siècle Brussels. University of Antwerp
En Ecoutant du Schumann. Aesthetic Space and Interiority in Fin-de-siècle Brussels. KU Leuven
Circles such as Les XX and La Libre Esthétique showed that the consumption of art and music in fin de siècle Belgium was a distinctively private matter, often situated in the domestic and private spaces of bourgeois society, like homes or art studios. Yet, tastes were also part of a swiftly industrializing, modern public space. In this paradoxical context, and precisely because of it, art and music, like the hybrid domestic environment in ...
A formal and thematic analysis of the journalistic texts of fin-de-siècle women writers in Britain. KU Leuven
Political centralization, economic integration and language evolution in Central Africa: An interdisciplinary approach to the early history of the Kongo kingdom Ghent University
KONGOKING is an interdisciplinary and interuniversity research group which aims at contributing to a better understanding of the origins and early history of the Kongo kingdom. It unites researchers from Ghent University (UGent), Brussels University (ULB) and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (RMCA), as well as from several partner institutions in Africa, Europe and the USA.
The outside of modernity? (Semi)private exterior spaces and the arts in fin-de-siècle Belgium KU Leuven
This project aims to explore how within the art world of late 19th century Belgium (1860-1914), the (semi)private interior and exterior space became more strongly entangled in imagery, use, experience and meaning. Focusing on their function as sites of artistic creation, self-fashioning and sociality, it will highlight how this interconnectedness made them a multifaceted and significant breeding ground for and reflection of new ideas of ...
Redefining Picturesque and Symbolist Qualities in the fin-de-siècle: the Case of Bruges “the Beautiful/the Dead”. Ghent University
When calling a place “picturesque”, do we mean “pretty”, or perhaps “predictable” or “superficial”? Over a century ago, when symbolist artists sought melancholic views to express the hidden soul of things, were such “picturesque” places suitable? One way to find out is to scrutinize painted, printed and drawn portrayals of a city labelled both picturesque and symbolist: the Belgian city of Bruges. Each of Bruges’ identities around 1900 - ...
Artificial Creation and Procreation in Late-Victorian Short Fiction KU Leuven
This thesis investigates the connections between creativity and childbirth in fin-de-siècle short fiction. It questions how late-Victorian perceptions of gender, sexuality, science, and art informed the fashion in which artificial and biological creation were represented in the literature of the time. The corpus under consideration includes short stories and novellas by H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, Oscar ...
Wagnerian Networks beyond France: New Perspectives on Gender, Art and Spaces of Performance around 1900 KU Leuven
Richard Wagners oeuvre was a touchstone for new creative and cultural memory making at the turn of the 20th century. Yet the reach and impact of Wagnerism as an artistic, cultural and social phenomenon, opening new conceptions of its interactions beyond its Paris-centered networks, is still under-investigated. The objectives of this PhD scholarship will be to develop knowledge of Wagnerian constructs of the artwork, encompassing visual, music ...