Projects
Literature, Science and the Unconscious: the influence of Mesmerism on Italian Culture (1870-1950) KU Leuven
My aim in this project is to study the intersections between literature, (pseudo)sciences of the mind and the paranormal in Italy during the 19th and 20th centuries. More specifically, the focus will be on literary uses of mesmerism, a therapeutic practise based on magnetism, in Italian literature between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. My analysis will focus on three central figures in this context: Gabriele ...
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) ...
Making Sense(s) of Children in Literature on the US-Mexican border Ghent University
This project studies the role of the child from a sensorial perspective in a transnational corpus of contemporary US-Mexican border literature in order to question established conceptualizations of childhood. First, the sensorial experience of the child in a border context will be mapped, then the child’s sensorium will be approached from a narratological and stylistic focus in order to establish which image of childhood is represented.
Constructing Gay Identities and Communities through Literary Style in French Gay AIDS Literature between 1989 and 1999. University of Antwerp
Beyond Petroleum. Reimagining Energy in Contemporary Film and Literature KU Leuven
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 ...
Archiving the Human: Toward a Textual and Contextual Approach to American Literature in the Anthropocene KU Leuven
This methodologically innovative project is the first to systematically engage state-of-the-art theoretical reflections on the Anthropocene in analyses of a significant and representative sample of contemporary American literature. The geological notion of the Anthropocene has in recent years become an increasingly prominent research paradigm in the humanities and the social sciences. In the study of literature, and especially the field of ...
The Prussian Phantasm. Imaginations of Prussia in 20th- and 21st-Century German Literature. KU Leuven
Since the mid-19th century, Prussia has been mythologised as a vigorous European superpower, which played a pivotal role in the political, socio-economic, intellectual and cultural life of Europe in general and Germany in particular. Conceived as it was as a progressive, enlightened and efficiently-run state as well as a centre of reaction, militarism and imperialism, the legacy of Prussia is profoundly ambivalent. This Janus-faced status has ...
Literature that bypassed the censor! The alternative literary circuit in Antwerp at the end of the seventeenth century. University of Antwerp
Literature and Pornography: a textual and contextual study of Dutch novels in the 1960s and 1970s. KU Leuven
The interaction between pornography and modern fiction has rarely been examined in Dutch literary studies. The present proposal seeks to remedy this by focusing on a corpus of pornographic novels from the 60s and 70s written by renowned authors (Ferron, Geeraerts, Heeresma en Krijgelmans) who represent different forms of literature. The aim is twofold: (1) to contextualize these pornographic texts and determine their institutional position in ...