Bio
I am a postdoctoral research fellow of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen) affiliated with the English Department at Ghent University, where I was formerly an assistant professor and where I co-founded the Centre for Literature and Trauma (LITRA). 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 current academic year I am a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. I hold degrees from the University of Leuven (PhD, licentiate), the University of Hull (MA), and the Catholic University of Brussels (candidate).
My PhD research, funded by a scholarship from the Flemish Research
Council, led to a dissertation on trauma and ethics in the novels of
the contemporary British author Graham Swift
, which I have reworked
into a book (Sussex Academic Press, 2005). I have also co-edited a special double issue of Studies in the Novel on postcolonial trauma novels (2008; with Gert Buelens) and published various
articles on modern English literature in both journals and books. At present I am working on a monograph entitled Postcolonial Witnessing: The Trauma of Empire, the Empire of Trauma, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, and co-editing an essay collection on the topic of transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory (with Michael Rothberg).
Much of my postdoctoral 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 gross human-rights violations.
human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhumanGiorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz