Projects

The imagination of bacteria and viruses – invisible to the naked eye – was ubiquitous in popular culture from the Interwar Period onwards. State actors such as politicians, bureaucrats involved in the rapidly growing public health sector and military officers, as well as medical experts working on infectious
diseases, let their imagination run free on the hunt for ‘deadly germs’. Future visions of pandemics after
the ‘Spanish Flu’ ...

The project inscribes itself in Gothic criticism’s recognition of the temporal dynamic of Gothic narratives. It articulates the Gothic as an aesthetic that negotiates the temporal and ideological relation between past and present. The study examines how female authors from Scotland and Ireland stage the past in Gothic texts in the Romantic Period (1780-1830). In particular, it focuses on the emplotment and anachronisation of the ...

Ecological issues occupy an ever-growing place in contemporary literature. I intend to examine how francophone novels and novellas by Maghrebi, Sub-Saharan and Indian Ocean islands authors address the environmental problems of Africa. As there was an ecological leap forward in the African literary imagination as a consequence of market globalisation and the establishment of capitalist regimes after fall of the Berlin Wall, I will focus on ...

The imagination is traditionally considered the capacity of the mind to make things present despite their actual absence. Since all knowledge requires that we retain the images of past things, any kind of knowledge can be said to rely on the imagination. Seen in this way, using one’s imagination is not primarily a matter of making things up. Even though many philosophers have recognized this basic function of the imagination, most ...