Projects
In-between Identities: generation 1.5 in Moroccan immigrants’ literature in Spain Ghent University
In recent years, migration has become one of the defining features and preoccupations of European societies and a prominent literary theme. During the 1970s and 1980s, Spain experienced a wave of Moroccan migration that peaked at the beginning of the 1990s. Representations of Moroccan immigrants in Spanish media and literature have tended to be negative, shaped by a long history of tension between the two countries going back to al-Andalus, ...
The networked author: rethinking contemporary authorship through comics after the digital turn Ghent University
This project aims to investigate contemporary authorship in comics, examining how the concept is understood and focusing on the way comics are created, shared, and read in a digital environment. Comics are an ideal case study because they lie at the intersection of narrative and visual culture, displaying practices, symbolic apparatuses and production structures similar to, or shared by, other media. In particular, I argue that comics after ...
Happiness and Agency in Queer Young Adult Literature: An Exploration of Empowering Scenarios in Literary Emotionality University of Antwerp
In-between Identities: generation 1.5 in Moroccan immigrants' literature in Spain. University of Antwerp
Narrative, Metaphor and Metamorphosis: The Ecological Potential of Contemporary Children's Literature Ghent University
Situated at the intersection of the study of children’s literature, ecocriticism and cognitive literary criticism, this project revisits the question of the transformational potential of children’s literature in light of the imaginative challenges raised by the Anthropocene, a newly identified epoch in which the geological make-up of the earth has been transformed by human impact. Starting from the assumption that, in order for substantial ...
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 ...
Seriousness and Science Fiction (SF&A): How concerns with seriousness proliferate through, and impact on, the reading, writing and discussion of the genre Ghent University
Since its nascency in the American pulp magazines of the 1920s, science fiction (SF) has had a particular relationship with the concept of seriousness. Characterised as juvenile in both its content and readership, SF has had to argue for its place in both literary and academic consideration. Debates about the strategies that could elevate the genre into serious consideration, or doom it to sneers, have been common since its birth, in both ...
The Road to Alexandria. The Sensation of Landscapes in European Travel Writing, 1919-1939 Ghent University
Until now, the study of travel writing has mostly focused on the visual ‘gazes’ on foreign people and places. Challenging the longstanding neglect of non-visual sensations, this project will analyze the interplay of sounds, tastes, smells, and textures in non-fictional published travel accounts. This approach will be applied to the sensation of arduous landscape types in Southeastern Europe and Western Asia recorded by countercultural travel ...
The Holy Romance. Characterization and concepts of fiction in Italo-Greek hagiography Ghent University
This project envisages for the first time a systematic, literary-rhetorical analysis of Italo-Greek hagiography, a corpus of which the prominent, narrative qualities have long been recognized but, for historical reasons of academic ideology, have never received serious scholarly attention in their own right. This corpus comprises Lives, martyr acts and encomia written in Greek between the 5th and the 13th centuries and describing the lives of ...