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 ...
Literature, Nature, and Ecology: An Ecopoetic Approach to Contemporary French, Germanophone, Anglophone, and Italian Narrative Prose Ghent University
The project entails an ecopoetic inquiry into literary fiction on nature and ecology as a transcultural problem area within four interacting cultural regions (French, Germanophone, Anglophone, Italian). Central to this text-oriented approach are (1) the role of the literary imagination, (2) the focus on textual complexity (rhetoric) and (3) the ten-sion between the global nature of the problem and culture-bound issues.
Britain in Europe: The Emergence of Post-Insular Identities and Transcultural Discourses in Contemporary British Literature Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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 ...
Rewriting Anthropocene Aesthetics: A Rhetorical and Narratological Analysis of the Sublime in Contemporary U.S. Literature KU Leuven
The main goal of this project is to explore the rhetorical and aesthetic affordances and limits of the sublime for figuring modes of materiality and (non-)human agency in contemporary U.S. literature. Because the sublime has a particularly contested literary and cultural history in the USA, where the “American Sublime” has been entangled with problematic notions such as the wilderness, the frontier, and technology, this project offers close ...
Is the Future Ours? Exploring Literature and Politics in Contemporary Mexican Fiction Through the Bildungsroman KU Leuven
This project aims to make an important contribution to the study of contemporary Latin American literature by challenging the idea that it has turned away from politics. The generations of writers born in the 1960s and 1970s have been described as apolitical because of their focus on individuals who are often passive or self-centered, and because of their rejection of former, more politicized literary models. In contrast, I will show how ...
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 ...
Beyond Petroleum. Reimagining Energy in Contemporary Film and Literature Ghent University
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 ...
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 ...