Efacis - Centre of Irish Studies
The Ghent Centre of Irish Studies
Head of Centre:
Prof. Stef Craps; Ghent University
Email: Stef.Craps@ugent.be
Members:
- Prof. Dr. Andrew Benjamin Bricker
Andrew Bricker is an Assistant Professor of English Literature in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University and a Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in California. Before joining UGent he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at McGill University in Montreal and a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His research focuses especially on British literature before 1800; law and literature; the history and theory of satire; the history and theory of the novel; book history and material culture; and cognitive approaches to literature.
Gert Buelens is a professor of English and American literature at Ghent University. His degrees are from the Universities of Ghent (Lic. English and German, 1984; Teacher training, 1985) and Sussex (DPhil in American Studies, 1990). He has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, 1996-7; the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC), 2009; and the School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2014-15. Buelens has edited or co-edited Deferring a Dream: Sub-Versions of the American Columbiad (Birkhäuser, 1994), Enacting History in Henry James (Cambridge UP, 1997), The Catastrophic Imperative: Subjectivity, Time and Memory in Contemporary Thought (Palgrave, 2009), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2013), and the Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). Monographs include Henry James and the "Aliens": In Possession of the American Scene (Rodopi, 2002; American Studies Network Book Prize) and editions of Confidence and Washington Square (with Susan Griffin) in the Cambridge Complete Fiction of Henry James (forthcoming). Buelens is the author of some sixty essays in collections and journals, the latter including American Studies in Scandinavia, Modern Philology, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Diacritics, Studies in the Novel, Textual Practice, Criticism and PMLA. He is the Book Review Editor for the Henry James Review and is Editor-in-Chief of the open-access journal Authorship, and serves on several editorial boards, including Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Canadian Review of American Studies, Comparative American Studies, E-REA: Revue d’études anglophones, Henry James E-Journal, Journal of American Studies of Turkey, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Open Humanities Press, and the book series Passages – Transitions – Intersections (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). He is a past president (2005) of the Henry James Society and was Secretary-General of the European Association for American Studies, 2011-14. His recent research has been in the area of literature and trauma on the one hand, and Henry James on the other. For the former, he has mainly engaged with the question of how the catastrophes that strike day in, day out, whether they form the legacy of well-recognized repressive political systems like Nazism (for instance in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution) or Apartheid (J. M. Coetzee), or amount to less tangible forms of un-freedom (as in Herman Melville’s Bartleby), make it impossible to achieve more than a very limited ability to act for change, a point he explores in the context of Judith Butler’s theory of the inevitably citational basis of social agency. From a more strictly literary perspective, he has explored (for instance with regard to Henry James’s The American Scene) how the ethical effect of literature must be situated in what he sees as the reader’s syntagmatic participation in the text rather than paradigmatic identification with protagonists. Buelens also takes an interest in finance fictions since the late nineteenth century and how a notion of "speculative selves" might take shape in that context.
Marco Caracciolo is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at UGent, where he coordinates the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh” (NARMESH). He received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Bologna in 2012. Before coming to Ghent, Marco has held fellowships in Hamburg, Groningen, and Freiburg, and he has been a “Project Narrative” visiting scholar at Ohio State University.
Marco’s work focuses on the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is also interested in readers’ engagement with characters whom they perceive as mentally deviant (narrating animals, serial killers, cyborgs). He has recently begun to investigate the relationship between narrative and scientific models, particularly models that challenge the human-scale world of bodily experience.
Marco has published in journals such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Modern Fiction Studies, and New Literary History. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014; honorable mention for the Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).
Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; paperback 2015) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), and the editor, with Lucy Bond and Pieter Vermeulen, of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017; paperback 2018). He has also guest-edited two special issues of Studies in the Novel, on climate change fiction (with Rick Crownshaw) and postcolonial trauma novels (with Gert Buelens), and one of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, on transcultural Holocaust memory (with Michael Rothberg). His next book project is an introductory guide to the concept of trauma for Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series (with Lucy Bond). He is currently also guest-editing a special issue of American Imago on ecological grief.
For more information, visit his personal website at www.stefcraps.com.
- Prof. Dr. Marianne Van Remoortel
Marianne Van Remoortel is Associate Professor at the Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University. She completed her PhD on gender, genre and the nineteenth-century sonnet in 2007. As a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, 2009-2015), she specialized in Victorian periodicals, with particular focus on periodical poetry and women’s contributions to the periodical press. She is the author of Lives of the Sonnet, 1787-1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism (Ashgate, 2011) and Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press (Palgrave, 2015; runner-up 2015 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize), and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of European Periodical Studies. Her ERC Starting Grant project “Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710-1920″ takes her research on the periodical press into a new transnational collaborative direction.
