Projects
Harlem, Capital of World Literature? James Baldwin’s 21st-Century Career and the Dynamics of Contemporary World Literature KU Leuven
The academic study of world literature was boosted around the turn of the millennium by three field-defining accounts of the dynamics that make particular authors and oeuvres count as world literature (Casanova; Damrosch; Moretti). Now that world literature has consolidated itself as an academic object of study, it has entered a self-reflexive phase. This project is part of this “critical world literature studies” moment (Helgesson and ...
Innovations in Methodologies and Syllabus: Digital Humanities and Philippine Literature (DigiPhiLit) University of Antwerp
Shaping Belgian Literature Before 1830. Multilingual Patterns and Cultural Transfer in Flemish and French Periodicals in the Southern Low Countries. KU Leuven
This project examines literary culture in the Southern Low Countries during a formative period in the history of Belgium (1750-1830). In the historiography of the Low Countries, eighteenth-century literature – especially as it was created and received in the Southern part – remained largely unexplored. More importantly, in previous research, the multilingual and hybrid character of this literature has been mostly neglected. Researchers indeed ...
Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures: Petrocultural Violence and Resistance in Contemporary Indigenous Literature, Art, and Film KU Leuven
This proposed project, entitled "Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures", will offer the first in-depth study of literary and artistic Indigenous (American, Canadian, and Australian) responses to settler-colonial extractivism from three carefully chosen sites; namely the coal and uranium mines in the Navajo Nation (USA), the Athabasca tar sands (Canada), and the Adani Carmichael coal mining site in Queensland (Australia). The impact of fossil ...
Shaping “Belgian” Literature before 1830: Multilingual Patterns and Cultural Transfer in Flemish and French Periodicals in the Southern Low Countries KU Leuven
If still largely underexplored, proto-Belgian 18th-century literature in turn has to date mainly been described from a nation-state, monolinguistic perspective. The present project aims to broaden this perspective by investigating the extent to which proto-Belgian literature was subject to transcultural influences, as well as how it was in turn actively involved in the process of European literary exchange. The specific focus of the project ...
Digitization and curation of the visual aspects (illustration, design) of Belgian popular literature of the 20th and 21st Century. KU Leuven
At KU Leuven, the Literary Theory and Cultural Studies Research Group is committed to the study of 20th and 21st century literary, visual, digital and performance culture. The Group seeks to elucidate the recent cultural past and our contemporary culture, while also contemplating future strategies for cultural innovation and preservation. The Group studies both ‘high’ and popular cultural practices in different regions of Europe ...
21st-Century Literature and the Holocaust. A Comparative and Multilingual Perspective. University of Antwerp
The reception of Scandinavian Literature in the Netherlands and Flanders 1860-1940. A comparative Analysis of the role of Networks and the Impact of the Ethnolinguistic Discourse. Ghent University
This research aims at mapping and analyzing the networks of Dutch and Flemish cultural transmitters who, between 1860 and 1940, had a particular interest in Scandinavian literature. The analysis is based on a model of Social Network Analysis that is designed specifically for cultural transfer. A contrastive Dutch-Flemish perspective makes it possible to bring up language ideology abd the ethnolinguistic discourse.
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 ...