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. I study the way contemporary literature is produced, circulated, and valued in transnational contexts and how it can enrich our understanding of social and environmental realities.
I recently finished a monograph entitled Twenty-First-Century Fiction and the Grammar of Valuation (Cambridge University Press, 2027), which develops a novel account of literary value to identify what it sees as the three dominant literary grammars in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. With Tom Toremans and Rich Cole, I am finishing two volumes on the relation between the refugee and literature (The Refugee and Literature, forthcoming with Cambridge, and Refugee Rights Across the Humanities). With Núria Codina Solà and Jack McMartin and a team of three junior researchers, I am starting a large-scale research project (2026-30) entitled 'EMLIT: Pluriactivity, Digitality, and Mobility and the Emergence of World Literature.' The project combines sociological, ethnographic, and literary methods to study how contemporary world literature is shaped by a never fully consolidated form of permanent emergence.
I am the author of three previous books: Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust (Continuum, 2010), Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Literature and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2020). I am also the co-editor of fourteen volumes, most recently on the aesthetic agency of minor literature (a special issue of Interventions), the Anthropocene sublimes (for Ecozon@), the European legacies of James Baldwin (for the James Baldwin Review), the question of literary value (for b2o), and the interface of literary and ethics (a volume of the Yearbook of English Studies). 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 research. 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 recently finished a monograph entitled Twenty-First-Century Fiction and the Grammar of Valuation (Cambridge University Press, 2027), which develops a novel account of literary value to identify what it sees as the three dominant literary grammars in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. With Tom Toremans and Rich Cole, I am finishing two volumes on the relation between the refugee and literature (The Refugee and Literature, forthcoming with Cambridge, and Refugee Rights Across the Humanities). With Núria Codina Solà and Jack McMartin and a team of three junior researchers, I am starting a large-scale research project (2026-30) entitled 'EMLIT: Pluriactivity, Digitality, and Mobility and the Emergence of World Literature.' The project combines sociological, ethnographic, and literary methods to study how contemporary world literature is shaped by a never fully consolidated form of permanent emergence.
I am the author of three previous books: Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust (Continuum, 2010), Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Literature and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2020). I am also the co-editor of fourteen volumes, most recently on the aesthetic agency of minor literature (a special issue of Interventions), the Anthropocene sublimes (for Ecozon@), the European legacies of James Baldwin (for the James Baldwin Review), the question of literary value (for b2o), and the interface of literary and ethics (a volume of the Yearbook of English Studies). 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 research. 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.