Bio
I am a research professor in English literature at Ghent University, where I direct the Centre for Literature and Trauma (LITRA). Before taking up my current post, I served as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen) and an assistant professor at Ghent University. In the spring of 2009 I was a fellow of the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC), a Brussels-based institute of advanced study, and during the academic year 2009-2010 I was a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. I hold degrees from the University of Leuven (PhD, MA), the University of Hull (MA), and the Catholic University of Brussels (BA).
I am the author of Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005) and have served as 
guest editor for special issues of Studies in the Novel (2008; with Gert Buelens) and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2011; with Michael Rothberg) on the topics of, respectively, postcolonial trauma novels and transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory. I have also contributed to journals such as Callaloo, Canadian Review of American Studies, Contemporary Literature, Critique, Memory Studies, and Textual Practice, as well as to books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Wiley-Blackwell, and other academic presses. At present I am working on a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan titled Postcolonial Witnessing: The Trauma of Empire, the Empire of Trauma and a volume on the concept of trauma for Routledge's New Critical Idiom series.
Much of my current research focuses on the ways in which postcolonial literature in English bears witness to the suffering engendered by colonial oppression. Through a number of case studies I investigate the specificity of colonial traumas in relation to the hegemonic trauma discourse, analyse the textual strategies deployed to give them literary form, and explore the ethico-political stakes involved in the postcolonial memory work this literature undertakes. My latest research examines how, why, and to what effect the memory of the Holocaust is evoked in literary texts that connect the Nazi genocide of the European Jews with other exceptionally destructive, criminal, and catastrophic histories, such as slavery, colonialism, and other genocides.
human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhumanGiorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz