I am an assistant professor of American and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven. I was earlier an assistant professor at the University of Stockholm. I work in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, world literature, and memory studies.
My first book, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust, was republished in paperback by Continuum in the Spring of 2012. I published a second monograph, 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, and was published by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2015. I present the book here. My current writing project is a short book in Routledge's Literature and Contemporary Thought series entitled Literature and the Anthropocene. It argues that the impact of the Anthropocene on contemporary fiction is not only reflected in environmental themes, but also in radically altered understandings of what it means to write and of the notion of "form of life." It discusses the work of Don DeLillo, J.M. Ledgard, Ben Lerner, Emily St. John Mandel, Tom McCarthy, and others.
I am also the co-editor of seven volumes: two on the relation between literature and cultural identity; special journal issues on the work of Theodor W. Adorno and on the interrelations between Bildung and the state; on the methods and forms of world literature (entitled Institutions of World Literature, published by Routledge); on the notion of creatureliness (for the European Journal of English Studies). and on recent developments in memory studies (Memory Unbound, published by Berghahn). My writing has appeared (or will appear) in journals such as Anglia, Arcadia, Criticism, Critique, Genre, Literature Compass, Journal of Modern Literature, Memory Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Parallax, Poetics Today, Political Theory, 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.
