I am a professor of American and comparative literature at the University of Leuven. I mainly work in the fields of contemporary literature, world literature, and the environmental humanities. My current writing project, tentatively entitled Twenty-First-Century Literature and the Grammar of Valuation, studies the discourses and practices through which literary value is articulated in the present. I also (co-)direct two ongoing research projects: on the posthumous world literary career of James Baldwin and, with Tom Toremans and Rich Cole, on constellations of transnational mobility and human rights in expatriate African American writing. I talk about my different projects in an interview here.
I am the author of three books. Literature and the Anthropocene was published in Spring 2020 in Routledge's "Literature and Contemporary Thought" series. The book is the first to critically survey how the Anthropocene is enriching the study of literature and inspiring contemporary poetry and fiction. Engaging with topics such as genre, life, extinction, memory, infrastructure, energy, and the future, the book makes a case for literature’s unique contribution to contemporary environmental thought. It discusses works by John Burnside, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas King, J.M. Ledgard, Ben Lerner, Evelyn Reilly, Jeff VanderMeer, Alexis Wright, Karen Tei Yamashita and others.
My first book, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust, was republished in paperback by Continuum in 2012. I published a second monograph with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015, entitled Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form, on the paradoxical productivity of intimations of the end of the novel in early twenty-first-century fiction. The book discusses the work of, among others, J.M. Coetzee, Teju Cole, Lars Iyer, Hari Kunzru, Dana Spiotta, and James Meek.
I am also the co-editor of twelve volumes, most recently on the aesthetic agency of minor literature (a special issue of Interventions), the Anthropocene sublimes (for Ecozon@), and the European legacies of James Baldwin (for the James Baldwin Review). I earlier co-edited volumes on the methods and forms of world literature (Institutions of World Literature, published by Routledge) and on recent developments in memory studies (Memory Unbound, published by Berghahn). My writing has appeared in journals such as Contemporary Literature, Criticism, Cultural Critique, Environmental Humanities, Genre, Literature Compass, Journal of Modern Literature, Memory Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Poetics Today, Political Theory, Post45, Studies in the Novel, and Textual Practice.
Here you find more information about my writing and my teaching. Where possible I have posted links to online versions of my essays. If there is no link, or if you run into a paywall, email me and I will send you a copy.
I am the author of three books. Literature and the Anthropocene was published in Spring 2020 in Routledge's "Literature and Contemporary Thought" series. The book is the first to critically survey how the Anthropocene is enriching the study of literature and inspiring contemporary poetry and fiction. Engaging with topics such as genre, life, extinction, memory, infrastructure, energy, and the future, the book makes a case for literature’s unique contribution to contemporary environmental thought. It discusses works by John Burnside, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas King, J.M. Ledgard, Ben Lerner, Evelyn Reilly, Jeff VanderMeer, Alexis Wright, Karen Tei Yamashita and others.
My first book, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust, was republished in paperback by Continuum in 2012. I published a second monograph with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015, entitled Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form, on the paradoxical productivity of intimations of the end of the novel in early twenty-first-century fiction. The book discusses the work of, among others, J.M. Coetzee, Teju Cole, Lars Iyer, Hari Kunzru, Dana Spiotta, and James Meek.
I am also the co-editor of twelve volumes, most recently on the aesthetic agency of minor literature (a special issue of Interventions), the Anthropocene sublimes (for Ecozon@), and the European legacies of James Baldwin (for the James Baldwin Review). I earlier co-edited volumes on the methods and forms of world literature (Institutions of World Literature, published by Routledge) and on recent developments in memory studies (Memory Unbound, published by Berghahn). My writing has appeared in journals such as Contemporary Literature, Criticism, Cultural Critique, Environmental Humanities, Genre, Literature Compass, Journal of Modern Literature, Memory Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Poetics Today, Political Theory, Post45, Studies in the Novel, and Textual Practice.
Here you find more information about my writing and my teaching. Where possible I have posted links to online versions of my essays. If there is no link, or if you run into a paywall, email me and I will send you a copy.