About Me

I am a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where I direct the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, a research group that brings together scholars from across the humanities who work on issues of memory and trauma as mediated through culture. I have held visiting positions at UCLA, Birkbeck, the School of Advanced Study, Columbia University, and the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts.

I am the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), a co-author of Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). I have also (co-)edited special issues of Memory Studies Review, Collateral, American Imago, Studies in the Novel, and Criticism on climate witnessing (forthcoming), decolonizing English literature, art and climate change, ecological grief, climate change fiction, transcultural Holocaust memory, and postcolonial trauma novels. Currently, I am working on a study of ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process. Several of my publications have been translated into other languages, including Croatian, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Turkish.

Moreover, I am the founding coordinator of the Mnemonics network, an international collaborative initiative to provide research training in memory studies for doctoral students, and a co-chair of the “Transformation of the Environment” working group of the EU-funded Slow Memory COST Action.

My research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Much of my work explores how literature bears witness to traumatic or otherwise disturbing events and experiences.

My study of Graham Swift brought the insights of trauma theory and ethical criticism to bear on this major contemporary writer. While earlier critics had stressed the ways in which his novels undermine the truth claims of history by foregrounding its conceptual overlap with fiction, my reading reoriented the debate by arguing that the central question Swift’s work raises is not whether reality can be represented truthfully, but whether and how it can be worked through.

In retrospect, this study can be seen as a first attempt on my part to extend trauma theory beyond the field of Holocaust testimony and literature to which its application was usually restricted.

My subsequent research took this endeavour a step further. It set out to strip trauma theory of its persistent Eurocentric and monocultural bias, which is at odds with the field’s commitment to the promotion of transcultural solidarity.

It called into question the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, to favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and to adopt an anti-comparativist, compartmentalizing approach to interconnected traumatic histories.

My work in this area is widely credited with spearheading the trend towards pluralization, diversification, and inclusivity that characterizes the latest wave of literary and cultural trauma scholarship.

My contribution to the study of memory more broadly has been, firstly, to help effect a shift from a celebratory or euphoric moment in transnational or transcultural memory studies to a more critical and reflexive one and, secondly, to initiate a dialogue between memory studies and the environmental humanities.

My latest research focuses on how contemporary literature and culture more generally grapple with the aesthetic, ethical, and existential challenges associated with climate change and the Anthropocene, the proposed new geological epoch defined by human impact of which global warming is the most salient manifestation.

While climate change is often discussed in strictly scientific, economic, or technical terms, it also raises profound questions of meaning, value, and justice, as it unsettles conventional ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. Climate change challenges the imagination, shakes the very idea of what it means to be human, and forces us to re-frame our relationship to the planet and to each other.

I examine the human imaginative engagement with climate change via literary texts and other artistic works telling innovative stories that seek to facilitate the perspective shifts and the new ways of thinking and feeling that the Anthropocene imperatively demands.

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

Warsan Shire

Education

  • PhD 2003

    PhD in English Literature

    KU Leuven, Belgium

  • MA 2000

    MA in Women and Literature in English (distinction)

    University of Hull, UK

  • MA 1998

    Licentiate (MA) in English and Dutch Literature and Linguistics (summa cum laude)

    KU Leuven, Belgium

  • BA 1996

    Candidate (BA) in English and Dutch Literature and Linguistics (magna cum laude)

    KU Brussels, Belgium

Employment

  • Present2018

    Professor (Hoogleraar, BOF-ZAP until 2020)

    Ghent University, Department of Literary Studies

  • 20182015

    Associate Professor (Hoofddocent BOF-ZAP)

    Ghent University, Department of Literary Studies

  • Present2010

    Director, Cultural Memory Studies Initiative

    Ghent University

  • 20152010

    Assistant Professor (Docent BOF-ZAP, tenure-track)

    Ghent University, Department of Literary Studies

  • 20122006

    Postdoctoral Research Fellow

    Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) / Ghent University, English Department

  • 20062003

    Assistant Professor (Doctor-Assistent)

    Ghent University, English Department

Honours and Awards

  • 2020
    Sustainability Award for Teaching Excellence
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    Recipient (with Christel Stalpaert) of the 2020 Sustainability Award for Teaching Excellence awarded by Ghent University’s Green Office.
  • 2017
    Van Dyck Chair, University of California, Los Angeles
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    I was awarded the Antoon Van Dyck Chair for the History and Culture of the Low Countries, a visiting professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles, for the 2017-2018 academic year. A press release (in Dutch) is available here.
  • 2015
    Associate Member of Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences
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    I was elected Associate Member of the Belgian Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences, Section of Human Sciences.
  • 2014
    Shortlisted for 2014 ESSE Book Award
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    My book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds was shortlisted for the 2014 ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Book Award in the field of “Cultural Studies in English,” category A (senior scholars).
  • 2013
    Times Higher Education’s Books of 2013
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    My book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds was selected as one of Times Higher Education’s Books of 2013.
  • 2013
    Honorary Research Associate, Birkbeck, University of London
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    I served as an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English and Humanities of the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London during the spring of 2013.
  • 2013
    Visiting Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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    I served as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory in the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies of the School of Advanced Study, University of London during the spring of 2013.
  • 2009
    Visiting Scholar, Columbia University
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    I was a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University during the 2009-2010 academic year.
  • 2009
    Fulbright Postdoctoral Award
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    Fulbright postdoctoral award ($9,000) for one-year stay as Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.
  • 2009
    Honorary BAEF Fellowship
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    Honorary fellowship awarded by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) for one-year stay as Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.
  • 2009
    Fellow, Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts
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    I was a Fellow of the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC), a Brussels-based institute of advanced study, during the spring of 2009.
  • 2008
    Dan David Prize Scholarship
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    Dan David Prize Scholarship ($15,000) in the field of “Creative Rendering of the Past: Literature, Theater, Film,” awarded by the Dan David Foundation (Tel Aviv University).
  • 2006
    Shortlisted for 2006 ESSE Book Award
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    My book Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation was shortlisted for the 2006 ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Book Award in the field of “Literatures in the English language.” It was the only book by a first-time author to be thus honoured.
  • 1999
    FWO PhD Scholarship
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    Four-year full-time PhD scholarship awarded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen).
  • 1999
    AHRB Postgraduate Studentship (declined)
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    Fees-only scholarship awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) for a three-year full-time PhD programme at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK.

The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.

Amitav Ghosh