German literary modernism: Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus, Alexander Kluge; the encyclopaedic novel; documentary literature; avant-garde and politics.
Narratology and rhetoric: rhetorical narratology, unreliable narration, narrative unreliability, overt narration, transmedial narratology; honorary president of the European Narratology Network.
Digital humanities and computational literary studies: text mining, sentiment analysis, computational stylistics, digital literary criticism; member of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH).
Disability studies and the health humanities: neurodiversity, crip theory, neurophenomenology and embodiment in modernist and contemporary literature, in collaboration with Liselotte Van der Gucht.
Literary criticism and the literary field: digital and literary sociological analysis of evaluative talk of literature, literary prizes and book culture (with Lore De Greve).
Current projects
TalkLitMining — Evaluation of literature by professional and layperson critics: a digital and literary sociological analysis of evaluative talk of literature through the prism of literary prizes (2007–2017). FWO research project (G087119N), 2019–2023, promotor: Gunther Martens; researcher: Lore De Greve. Resulting in the PhD thesis of Lore De Greve, defended 30 April 2024.
Lore De Greve: TalkLitMining — Evaluation of literature by professional and layperson critics (2007–2017). Funded by FWO (G087119N). Defended 30.4.2024.
as co-director: Lieselot De Taeye (VUB): ‘Autobiographical documentary prose in the sixties and early seventies of the 20th century’ (director: Hans Vandevoorde). Research Project VUB/UGent (OZR1891/NVT).
as co-director: Deborah Van den Brande: Russischdeutsche Literatur (funded by FWO).
as co-director: Saartje Gobyn, Metalepse in six selected prose works written by Günter Grass (1961–2010).
as co-director: Maaike Van Liefde: Research Project UGent (01D25610): Humor en intertekstualiteit als ideologiekritische strategieën in het oeuvre van Thomas Brussig.
as director: Carolin Benzing: Verweigerung als Lebensentwurf. Eine Analyse der Strukturen literarischer Verweigerung bei Robert Walser, Wilhelm Genazino und Kurt Aebli (January 2014).
as co-director: Thorsten Ries: Gottfried Benn (July 2013). Joint PhD Ghent University / University of Hamburg, supervised by Martens.
as co-director: Daniela Puplinkhuizen; Gwendolin Engels: Der gute Europäer. Onderzoek naar de evoluties van het ideopoëem ‘Europa’ in geselecteerde Duitstalige prozaliteratuur van 1870 tot 1933 (2006–2011). Research project (UGent).
Previous research projects
CLS INFRA — Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (H2020, 2021–2024). UGent participation via GhentCDH (48 person months), with Julie Birkholz, Christophe Verbruggen, Els Lefever, Gunther Martens and Sally Chambers as UGent promotors; project researcher: Tess Dejaeghere. Coordinator: Institute of Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków). Consortium partners: University of Potsdam, Austrian Academy of Sciences, UNED, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Humboldt University (Berlin), Charles University (Prague), DARIAH, Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, University of Trier, National University of Galway. The results are documented in the D8.5 Report on Applied NLP Sentiment Analysis (Zenodo, February 2025), with tools released as notebooks in the GhentCDH CLSinfra repository.
DARIAH-VL Virtual Research Environment Service Infrastructure (VRE-SI) (Hercules Foundation / FWO, grant G0H3717N, 2015–2018). GhentCDH led the development of the VRE-SI in the context of the Belgian node of DARIAH-EU: a sustainable portfolio of services for digital scholarship in the arts and humanities in Flanders and beyond (collaborative databases, digital text analysis, geospatial analysis).
(Computational) stylistics; narrativity, knowledge and the rhetorical interface. A diachronic study of the evolution of the encyclopaedic novel in German literature (funded by the Research Council, Ghent University).
“Narrative Unreliability”: workshop and edition in the framework of the FWO Research Community OLITH: ‘Literatuur, literatuuropvattingen, literatuurwetenschap: interactie en conflict’ (with Elke D'hoker).
2006–2009: personal FWO project: Literary polemics between fiction, non-fiction and hybrid-fiction (Heine, Kraus, Alexander Kluge).
2003–2006: FWO Project: A narratological approach to overt narrator profiles: a theoretical and diachronic point of view (from Heine to Elfriede Jelinek).
1999–2003: personal FWO project: Robert Musil and Hermann Broch.