Prof. dr. Gunther Martens

Gunther Martens is professor of German literature at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University, Belgium, and a member of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH). He holds a Master in Germanic Languages (Ghent University, 1998) and a Master in Literary Studies (Antwerp University, 1999). In the period 2006–2010 he was professor of literary theory at the Free University of Brussels and professor of German literature at Antwerp University.

His research is situated at the crossroads of German literary modernism, narratology and rhetoric, and the digital humanities. He is the author of a widely noted monograph on rhetorical and narratological aspects of German literary modernism (Beobachtungen der Moderne, 2006) and has published extensively on Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Alexander Kluge, Karl Kraus and Elfriede Jelinek. As a digital humanist he leads the FWO-funded project TalkLitMining (2019–2023), which applies text mining, sentiment analysis and computational literary studies to the evaluation of literature by professional and layperson critics. More recently, his work has focused on disability studies and the health humanities, in particular neurodiversity and neurophenomenology in modernist literature, in close collaboration with Liselotte Van der Gucht.

He is honorary president of the European Narratology Network, executive committee member of the Internationale Robert Musil Gesellschaft, and on the editorial board of the journals Authorship, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, CLW (Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap), Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch and of the book series Musil-Studien (Fink Verlag).

ORCiD ID:   https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3455-7910