Projects
The Road to Alexandria. The Sensation of Landscapes in European Travel Writing, 1919-1939 Vrije Universiteit Brussel
‘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 ...
Congo-Arab Heritage in Historical Narratives -CAHN KU Leuven
During the second half of the nineteenth century coastal merchants from the Swahili city-states on the African Indian coast engaged in the trade of slaves and ivory and gained control over the Upper Congo Basin in eastern Congo. The Congo-Arab War (1892-1894) between the colonial troops of King Leopold II and the coastal merchants ended the Swahili-Arab hegemony in the eastern Congo. The war became embedded in the narrative of the ...
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.
Towards a model for humour in nineteenth-century poetry - A conceptual study and an analysis of a growing subjectivity Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Miracle or Magic? The Figure of the 'Magos' in Byzantine Hagiography Ghent University
What is the difference between magic and miracle? Scholars today believe that it is not possible to reach clear definitions of ‘magic’ and ‘miracle’ capable of answering that question: theoretically, one cannot meaningfully differentiate between the two. However, for Christians of the first centuries and later, the distinction between magic and miracle was crucial. This does not mean they were not sensitive to the fluidity of the spheres of ...
Telling the I, telling the truth, telling in Italian hypermodernity. The interaction between writing on personal experience and essay in the first-person essay-novel Het ik vertellen, de waarheid vertellen, vertellen in de Italiaanse hypermoderniteit. De KU Leuven
My research is focused on hybrid forms of contemporary Italian narrative (see Palumbo Mosca 2014), and will more in particular address a set of discursive phenomena, consisting in the interaction between essayistic writing and different forms of autobiographical, biographical and diaristic writing that can be defined as typical of personal experience (Mazzoni 2011) and typical of the Self (Marchese 2014) with essaystic forms of writing Within ...
This Is Who I Could Be: Storyworld Possible Selves and Fictionality. University of Antwerp
Widening the Net: Knowledge and the Novel in the Internet Age Ghent University
The ever-increasing availability of information, made possible by the Internet today, transforms the way people perceive and acquire knowledge. This project maps the effects of this epistemological shift in the literary form of the novel, hypothesizing that the notion of the sublime helps us understand how literary fiction dramatizes it. The sublime aesthetic, which presents the unpresentable, reflects the way the unfathomable scope of the ...
Tours on Paper. Literary Explorations of the Itinerarium in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Ghent University
Although pilgrimage characterised Christianity from its beginnings, the fourth century saw a dramatic increase of travelling to the Holy Land and Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. This is reflected in a boom of "itineraria": texts describing the routes to and from the holy sites, as well as the places and monuments encountered along the way. These works did not just have a utilitarian function as a travel guide, but were also conceived as ...