Supervision

This project will reorient the study of Italian Holocaust-related literary production by defining and investigating a new category of it, consisting of texts by Jewish authors that bear witness to the experience of living in hiding to escape deportation to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. It will centre the experience of concealment by analysing unexplored narratives and reinterpreting widely known texts, identifying and inventorying the characteristics of what can be called “the literature of hiding.” The project will examine the extent to which this rich but often overlooked body of texts can reshape how the period of discrimination and persecution in Italy between 1938 and 1945 is publicly remembered and expand the discourse around the Holocaust in the country as well as beyond its borders. It aligns itself with the commitment of the few remaining survivors from that era to ensuring that Italian society keeps the memory of discrimination, persecution, deportation, and mass murder alive and relevant, even—or especially—in the absence of direct witnesses.

Memory scholars have been criticizing the state of collective memory in the West arguing that efforts made to commemorate the crimes of the twentieth century have neither reduced racism nor spread tolerance across society. Building on the latest memory studies and historical scholarship, this project contends that the main shortcoming of contemporary memory has been a still too limited conceptualization of a sense of responsibility for the past. To address this problem, the project focuses on the memory of a major phenomenon of Europe’s tragic history, i.e. Italian fascism, examining, through theories of memory and responsibility, a corpus of seventeen Italian novels published from the 1990s onwards. Guido Bartolini’s analysis will demonstrate that contemporary literature breaks with self-absolving ideas that have long dominated Italian memory by thematizing the direct and indirect involvement of common citizens in fascist crimes and addressing the issue of Italian complicity in the dictatorship. The project will show how contemporary literature is not only reorienting the Italian memory of fascism but also offering narrative patterns to think about the past in responsible ways. Hence, through the study of Italian literature, the project will develop a critical approach to past injustices centred on the notion of transgenerational responsibility for the past that can tackle the shortcomings that scholars have found in Western memory.

The Syrian conflict is marked by a striking paradox between the abundance of evidence of international crimes and the dearth of justice avenues. Both the dwindling international justice mobilisation and innovative justice efforts by Syrian and international entrepreneurs highlight the necessity to open up the “justice imagination”, i.e. the way in which justice is conceived within and beyond the judicial realm.

This dissertation centres around the complementarity between narrative artistic practices and justice efforts, recognising that these are two distinct fields while exploring their potential intersections. The overarching research question is whether and, if so, how Syrian literary writing can counter the erasure and invisibilisation of injustices. Analysing this question empirically, I have examined a) (transitional) justice efforts in the Syrian context and b) contemporary Syrian literary writing. The scarcity of formal justice avenues highlights the value and complementary nature of informal initiatives, including artistic practices, in the pursuit of justice and accountability. I argue that in contexts of violent conflicts that are characterised by disinformation, epistemological uncertainty, outsider indifference, and a profound justice impasse, the power of imagination offers a unique means for navigating the complexities of victimisation, traumatic experiences, and pathways to justice. Informal practices in the artistic and the civil society realm can fill a critical void, especially when formal avenues are absent or inaccessible.

Despite the absence of a political transition, Syrian and international justice actors (entrepreneurs within civil society and formal institutions) use the transitional justice paradigm to advance justice. My research demonstrates that their mobilisation of transitional justice is characterised by extensive experimentation with and resistance against the standardised paradigm. Using the transitional justice toolkit, Syrian justice actors strengthen the struggle for justice and further their resistance against authoritarianism and international crimes, spearheading initiatives in the field of documentation, criminal accountability, and truth-seeking. Informal initiatives, including artistic practices, are essential sites of innovation and disruption. Victim groups, in particular, demonstrate remarkable creativity in employing transitional justice tools to address their justice needs. Truth-seeking initiatives spearheaded by Syrian victim groups and CSOs have not only increased the attention for victims’ needs and perspectives, but they have also had a significant impact on ongoing justice efforts, prompting necessary adjustments and improvements.

Literature is a crucial aspect of the artistic response to injustices, with many Syrian writers – mostly in the diaspora – sharing the aspiration of justice actors to bear witness and counter forcible forgetting. Drawing from empirical research conducted with Syrian writers, I demonstrate that literary writing “presences” experiences of harm, foregrounds multiple truth claims, and allows for epistemic resistance. On the basis of a close reading of the novels Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa and Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek and reader response research, I contend that literary writing can invite readers to jump into the unknown. While Syrian literature is no panacea to Syria fatigue and the climate of uncertainty, it can serve as fictional recordings of harm and echo experiences that were invisibilised or erased. When formal justice efforts and avenues face significant limitations or are non-existent, the imagination can offer a means to complement or bolster ongoing endeavours and generate future justice initiatives.

Catherine Gilbert‘s postdoctoral project explores commemorative responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, seeking to build an understanding of the forms of commemoration taking place among Rwandan genocide survivors living in the diaspora. Focusing on three European case study areas – Belgium, France, and the UK – it will examine the myriad ways in which community groups, authors, artists, and creative practitioners are communicating their experiences of violence and exile to the host societies, and will investigate the impact of place and displacement on commemorative practices within diasporic communities. As the 25th anniversary of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda approaches, this project will make an important and timely contribution to the field of cultural memory studies, advancing new critical paradigms – conceptualized in terms of a particular form of “exilic memory” – for understanding the articulation and transcultural circulation of memory in specific diasporic locations.

Ida Marie Olsen‘s PhD thesis explores the ways in which contemporary literature in English engages with what has come to be known as the sixth mass extinction, the ongoing extinction event as a result of human activity that is causing a devastating loss of biodiversity not seen since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Building on existing environmental humanities scholarship, the thesis demonstrates and tests literature’s capacity to complement or counter the spectacular, apocalyptic, and exclusionary modes through which species extinction is often portrayed in popular culture, and thereby to contribute to understanding and ameliorating our dire environmental predicament. Drawing on materialist and multispecies theories, the study pursues two avenues of research: it examines species extinction as both, and simultaneously, a material reality and a cultural discourse.

In the first part of the thesis, Olsen investigates how fiction mediates and registers the underlying structural drivers of biodiversity loss, which tend to be neglected in coverage of the extinction crisis. In chapter 1, through analyses of works by Lydia Millet, Henrietta RoseInnes, and Julia Leigh, she argues for the existence of a dialectical relationship between species extinction and capitalism – or an extinction industry – where capitalism drives species extinction while species extinction also provides new possibilities for capitalist accumulation, and where cultural products are imbricated in this dialectic. Inspired by Nicole Shukin’s work on animal capital, she demonstrates how the primary texts’ critiques of capitalogenic species extinction are undermined by their participation in forms of animal fetishizing; i.e., acts that contribute to the circulation of extinct and endangered species as spectral and “undying” signifiers in market life.

Bringing together materialist and postcolonial theories, Olsen turns to the whaling fictions of Kim Scott, Tim Winton, and Linda Hogan in chapter 2 in order to investigate how the twin forces of capitalism and colonialism lead to the endangerment of cetacean populations. She argues that these texts illuminate the dynamics of whaling frontiers in what Jason W. Moore has termed the capitalist world-ecology, revealing how such commodity frontiers entail ecological exhaustion as well as colonial intrusions into the lifeways and cultures of Indigenous peoples.

The second part of the thesis analyses the web of values, biases, and exclusions that characterizes species extinction discourse. Chapter 3 centres on the issue of taxonomic bias and the fact that representations of endangered species gravitate towards the cute, visible, and charismatic. Olsen suggests that novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, and Orson Scott Card, put into dialogue with Levinasian alterity ethics, offer insight into how authors grapple with the representational challenges of narrating the multispecies complexities of the sixth mass extinction and the endangerment of non-charismatic creatures such as plants and insects.

The fourth and final chapter takes up extinction discourse’s inherent bias towards living entities and the species category, and investigates how literature responds to the extinction of non-living entities, such as snow and glaciers, that large-scale environmental change is expected to bring about. Short stories by Aritha Van Herk and Keri Hulme reveal what a one-dimensional focus on species extinction as an isolated phenomenon excludes, and can be seen to call for a more holistic approach to the global environmental crisis.

Mees Kempenaers’s PhD thesis examines how trans and genderqueer poetry navigates the complex intersection between body, gender, and text. Their approach is informed by work in feminist, queer, and transgender studies, and work on embodiment and gender in different fields that engage with this intersection. Secondly, it considers the materiality of the poems itself by considering the various forms in which bodies of text are gathered: the anthology, the poetry collection, the zine, performance and slam poetry, etc. What does it mean to assemble these texts in these particular forms? How to assemble a body of work that concerns such varying types of bodies and experiences? The aim is ultimately to explore the central thematic concerns related to gender and the body and the use of language and poetic form in trans and genderqueer poetry, as well as the forms of publication in which these texts appear, in order to map an emerging poetics of trans and genderqueer embodiment.

Literary critics have extensively discussed Anthropocene fiction and (to a lesser degree) poetry, but relatively little attention has been paid so far to the strategies used within contemporary theatre to tackle the challenges the Anthropocene poses to the human imagination.

The proposed new geological epoch defined by human impact requires a shift in thinking that decentres human experience and brings non-human scales to the fore. A prominent strand within ecocriticism questions whether linguistic narrative is an appropriate mode for imaginative engagement with the Anthropocene, because it is so closely tied to anthropocentric thinking and human actions and intentions. Theatre seems to face an even bigger challenge than fiction in this regard. Unlike written narrative, performed narrative is dependent not only on human language, but also on human bodies that act out, or at least convey, the story.

Starting from these observations, Mahlu Mertens’s PhD thesis explores how the embodied nature of theatre can offer opportunities to think through the pressures and challenges of the Anthropocene. It is situated at the intersection of literary studies and theatre studies, and draws on ecocriticism and affect theory as well as narratology and performance theory.

The corpus consists of plays that deploy innovative formal structures to capture aspects of this epoch, but that simultaneously explore possible affective responses to the friction between the human and more-than-human scales that characterizes the Anthropocene. Alongside two well-known British plays – Lungs by Duncan Macmillan and Oil by Ella Hickson – the thesis discusses several lesser-known plays: Sila by the Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau, KillJoy Quiz by the Brazilian-Belgian writer and performer Luanda Casella, and World without Us and Are we not drawn onward to new erA by the Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed.

The aim of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it complements existing literary research on Anthropocene fiction by focusing on theatre instead of novels. On the other hand, it seeks to shed light on how intimate ties to human experience might not be a liability but an asset for narrative modes insofar as they can help bridge the scalar gap between the personal and the geological. The mismatch between scales can easily lead to paralysing affects like climate denial, cynicism, or apathy. This thesis explores how theatre, not despite but because of its embodied nature, might provide unique opportunities to evoke and explore alternative affects like expanded empathy, thoroughgoing irony, or stubborn hope.

Gry Ulstein‘s PhD research focuses on “weird” fiction, comparing earlier (H. P. Lovecraft) and more recent forms of weird (Jeff VanderMeer) and investigating the weird’s ecocritical potential as “catastrophic fiction.”

Maaheen Ahmed‘s second postdoctoral project at Ghent University examines children in comics in order to show how they reflect changing conceptualizations of childhood over time and across cultures while also channelling adult anxieties and questioning social order and categories. Focusing on popular works from four major hubs of European comics productions – Belgium, France, Britain, and Germany – the project takes as its starting point the boom in comics production in the late 1930s and traces the representation of children in long-running, understudied comics magazines such as The Beano and Spirou as well as contemporary graphic novels. It analyses, contextualizes, and compares the representation of the child in these works in order to gain insight into the collective consciousness and its transformations as filtered through the child and the notion of childishness.

Systematic politics of oblivion serve the current discourses of racism and xenophobia. In order to be dismantled through the artistic research, the mechanisms of the politics of oblivion and joint processes of racialization and dehumanization are traced in three geographically as well as temporally distant contexts within Europe: the negation of war crimes after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the construction of a new national identity in Serbia and Republika Srpska; the construction of a national identity in Austria after the Anschluss and its relation to the silence on the Holocaust; the construction of a Belgian identity in the aftermath of the country’s colonial past. By linking seemingly distant events through the research and production of an artwork, a reflective space will be created in which the question of the production of politics of memory and oblivion can be raised.

Sean Matharoo’s PhD research is situated within debates about the Anthropocene, a historical epoch characterized by humankind’s adverse impact on the planet due to the exploitation of land, water, animals, and fossil fuels. A recent wave of scholarship in the humanities has been devoted to ongoing ecological crises wrought by collective human action, such as climate change and mass species extinction. Unfortunately, by universalizing human experience, this discourse about the Anthropocene neglects histories of global human inequality, as evidenced by the environmental effects of Western industrialization and colonial expansion. These histories remind us of the importance of recognizing cultural difference – in particular, the responsibility of the West for ecological destruction – as we work towards an ethics of environmental justice.

During his residency at the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, Sean will begin to develop a critical “ecology” of Anglophone and Francophone speculative media, starting with a reappraisal of the French Surrealists’ experimental poetics. Though many Surrealists expressed support for decolonization in their subversive works, their fetishization of African cultures contributed to the West’s homogenization of distinct African poetics. Sean’s project culminates with an analysis of new musical and digital media that use experimental poetics to highlight histories of colonial expropriation and oppression. Such media, he argues, reclaim the subversive potentials of Surrealism, but enable encounters between different postcolonial traumas that respect cultural boundaries. His project’s ultimate goal is to develop a “postcolonial realism” committed to recognizing the unequal legacies of imperialism, including immigrant experiences, even as we struggle with the harmful geophysical impacts of global human action.

Confronted with the global existential threat of climate change, human subjects in the Anthropocene must grapple with a parallel teleological crisis: how do we direct ourselves as individuals and collectives in the face of an ongoing global catastrophe? To answer this question, River Ramuglia‘s thesis seeks to understand the material, cultural, and psychological mechanisms that authenticate meaningful action toward large-scale, systemic changes that might forestall the worst effects of climate change. This thesis names these mechanisms containment, exploring how contemporary climate change fiction, or “cli-fi,” uses the metaphorically flexible figure of the fallout shelter to help negotiate a relationship to the scale, complexity, and horror of climate change. The fallout shelter is inflected with the legacies of Cold-War containment culture, which developed in response to the similar existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Originally, containment culture was associated with resistance to the perceived threat of communism, but its ideological principle of defensive exclusion replicated throughout society, creating racially exclusive suburban localities that came to stand in for the space and place of the American nation. Contemporary cli-fi featuring the fallout shelter necessarily grapples with containment culture in its efforts to capture and manage global-scale problems, often in hyperlocal contexts. Such fictions position readers and spectators as contained subjects, converting pleasurable literary and cinematic escapism into a psychological survival tactic against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. This thesis also aims to broaden ecocriticism’s understanding of what cli-fi can be, selecting texts from a variety of narrative media that center the fallout shelter space as their primary dramatic fulcrum. While many of the texts examined in this thesis appear to have little to do with climate change, understanding them through the lens of containment demonstrates how climate change can be rendered in modalities beyond the apocalyptic imaginary. This thesis concludes by examining recent real-world deployments and imaginings of the fallout shelter, suggesting that containment culture persists in a more globally-conscious (but potentially more dangerous) fashion.

Lerato Machetela’s PhD research stems from her work as a clinical psychologist in Jagersfontein, South Africa. In her study, she highlights the usefulness of broadening the conceptualization of trauma to include how trauma manifests in contexts where it is not only “post” but is continuous and presents itself through everyday lived trauma related to issues such as living under conditions of humiliation and depravity. Moreover, through her study, she seeks to explore how we can understand the concept of transgenerational and intergenerational trauma in a context like South Africa, where the third generation is exposed to extreme conditions that are tantamount to the traumatic experience of the second and first generations.

Tobi Smethurst’s postdoctoral project examines the figure of the drone (also known as UAV or unmanned aerial vehicle) in contemporary fiction, art, and film. More specifically, it explores how contemporary media about drone warfare represent the unique perspectives offered to pilots by military drones, which are able to hover above a target for upwards of 30 hours before striking; the psychological effect on drone pilots of killing from a great distance, after becoming intimately familiar with a target; the traumatic impact of living under constant drone surveillance and the threat of unpredictable, catastrophic attacks; and the role of the drone as a magic bullet for military strategists, that is, as an emblem of virtuous war, a decidedly new type of low-risk, high-tech warfare built around surveillance and surgical strikes.

Lisa Vanlancker’s PhD project focuses on a corpus of literary texts about the Holocaust written by members of three successive generations from three different Dutch-Jewish families. It aims to understand how the historical trauma that is at the core of their writings has been represented and given meaning. As trauma takes on different shapes for each generation, it appears in different generic configurations: while first-generation writing primarily uses autobiographical genres such as the diary, memoir, or letter, second- and third-generation writers increasingly turn to fictional and often experimental modes of representation. By analysing a differentiated body of texts, ranging from first- to third-generation writing and covering a wide array of genres, this project examines the different ways in which texts by these Dutch-Jewish authors participate in and contribute to a culture of remembrance.

Holly Brown‘s PhD thesis explores the recurring trope of the sick male body in contemporary American fiction and late-twentieth-century performance art to prise open the complex biopolitical conditions of living in late capitalism. Bringing together philosophical theorizations of immunity with critical approaches to embodiment found in gender, queer, and disability studies as well as the medical humanities, it contends that the disintegration of bodies once considered “immune” is crucial for thinking about the neoliberal normalization of precarity. By placing fiction by Joshua Ferris, Ben Marcus, and Hanya Yanagihara into dialogue with the earlier endurance art of Ron Athey, Chris Burden, Bob Flanagan, and Tehching Hsieh, the thesis examines the effects of neoliberal ideology on lived experience and gauges the potential for new modes of relationality outside of this political and economic framework.

Maaheen Ahmed‘s first postdoctoral project at Ghent University is on trauma in contemporary comics, relying on a broad definition of trauma to encompass the aftermath of large-scale events (the two world wars, 9/11) as well as the reverberations of psychological damage in difficult personal situations.

At the heart of Sofie de Smet‘s PhD research lies the blurring of the clear linearity between narration and trauma recovery, which forms the topic of emerging theoretical developments in both transcultural trauma psychology and theatre studies. Both fields display emerging theoretical developments that question how this dominant western trauma paradigm is underpinned by the assumption of a linear relationship between trauma narration and recovery in which retelling traumatic experiences directly leads to healing. Sofie focuses on these debates that analogously develop within the fields of transcultural trauma psychology and theatre studies, raising questions about the validity of the dominant paradigm. More specifically, her study aims at furthering the post-narrative paradigm shift in both fields through an empirical analysis of post-narrative modes of trauma recovery in applied theatre. By combining analytical approaches from both transcultural trauma psychology and theatre studies, the study aims to further the understanding of trauma recovery shaped by modes of coping beyond narration.

Maria Zirra’s PhD dissertation traces ekphrastic and image-textual references to European, African, and Caribbean visual memory in the work of the three Anglophone poets Seamus Heaney (Northern Ireland), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) and Wopko Jensma (South Africa). Visual poetic memory, which affords a comparative lens through which to explore political and aesthetic aspects of the poetry, refers here to mentions, evocations, and prolonged ekphrastic and image-textual references to visual art and artists. Image-text is W. J. T. Mitchell’s term for the set of relations between text and image that obtain in mixed media configurations such as films, illustrated books, television, theatrical performance. In her dissertation, Zirra operates with experimental illustrated poetry books whose strategies span both classical ekphrasis – namely a deep textual and intermedial engagement with works of art – and a set of dynamic intervisual references, where the images illustrating the collections interpellate painters and other works of art. Outside these more predictable patterns of visual and verbal reference, the interpellating images also fulfil a number of other functions in relation to the poetry in the collections. For instance, they connect various parts of the text together by a sort of syncopation of visual reference: various visual tropes co-occur in text and image across different pages and sections drawing subtle threads together.

Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand‘s postdoctoral project focuses on representations of Holocaust memory by authors of the second and third generations, and examines more precisely how the body serves as a vector for memories of the genocide in postmemorial narratives.

Sean Bex’s PhD project explores the intersections of cultural memory and human rights through the lens of the oeuvre of the American author Dave Eggers. At the core of this research lies a two-pronged hypothesis. Firstly, that literary representations of traumatic memories in works such as Eggers’s What Is the What (2006) and Zeitoun (2009) can provide historical grounding for abstract human-rights discourses. Secondly, that human-rights discourse can in turn help memories to be articulated within a political and institutional framework. Additionally, Sean examines the ethical problems and questions arising from the literary form of Eggers’s recent works, which are conceived as collaborative testimonies in which a successful white, male, American author and a disadvantaged person of colour join forces in bearing witness to the latter’s traumatic past.

Recipient of the 2017 Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award for best doctoral dissertation (second prize)

What is the socio-political effectiveness of literary magazines in our globalized and digital age in which all cultural artifacts can be considered commodities, and mobilizing citizens against the status quo seems to have become the prerogative of the social media, as recent phenomena such as the Occupy Movement or the Arab Spring illustrate? Katrien Bollen’s postdoctoral project examines the relation between ethics and aesthetics through a case study of the highly influential yet curiously understudied literary magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (˚1998), founded and edited by American author and social activist Dave Eggers. In addition to opening up McSweeney’s for scholarly research, the project combines an analysis of the magazine’s content with an examination of what Genette has termed paratextual elements (e.g., cover design and blurbs) and epitexts (e.g., book reviews and media coverage). Against the backdrop of periodical studies as well as recent theories of independent publishing, commodification, and social activism – including Žižek’s category of “liberal communists,” rich entrepreneurs who, like Bill Gates or U2 frontman Bono, redirect part of their proceeds to non-profit organizations – this project tests the hypothesis that independent publishing methods and values are potentially instrumental to the cause of social justice.

Jessica Young‘s PhD thesis explores how contemporary South Asian fiction circumvents structures of state and geo-political power to transmit memories suppressed by hegemonic narratives of the past. In tracing how memories circulate within and beyond spaces of state remembrance, within and across national and cultural borders, it demonstrates how elided memories of trauma can forge transcultural connections between individuals and collectives.

In recent years the hegemonic, biomedical approach to psychic trauma, which focuses on the individual and is based on a mechanical idea of trauma, has been strongly criticized. This project aims to develop an alternative approach that is both subject-oriented and contextual. Possibilities and implications of this alternative approach will be explored.

Stijn Vervaet’s postdoctoral project focuses on the representation of the Holocaust in the work of Yugoslav authors of different generations and investigates how the memory of the Holocaust is constructed, transmitted, and evoked in relation to the representation of other instances of extreme state violence, such as during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Exploring how Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian fiction constructs and transmits memories of the Holocaust and examining how these memories intersect with other histories of suffering in the region, he seeks to contribute to the debate about the workings of trauma and memory, and about the aesthetic and ethical aspects of the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory.

Tobi Smethurst’s PhD thesis investigates the under-theorized potential of video games to represent psychological trauma in ways that “traditional” trauma-fiction media such as novels, films, or autobiographies cannot. It argues that, because of the inter(re)activity which is unique to the video game medium, games are able to present a variety of ways of making the player identify and/or empathize with protagonists and, through them, to virtually experience traumatized perspectives or perpetrate traumatizing acts. The thesis conducts a series of close readings of games (The Walking Dead, Limbo, Spec Ops: The Line, and others) that integrate trauma aesthetically and mechanically; that is, both visually/sonically/thematically and on the level of the rules which govern the experience of actually playing and progressing through the game.