Stef Craps

Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory—an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the 'ethical turn' affecting the humanities in the 1990s—is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. This book takes issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, and to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity. Moreover, it questions the assumption that a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia is uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and criticizes the neglect of the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies, Postcolonial Witnessing contends that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

This book offers a critical reading of the novels of Graham Swift in light of recent developments in literary theory and criticism. It shows how the novels elaborate an ethics of alterity by means of a detailed study of one of Swift’s most persistent and fascinating – yet all too often ignored – concerns: the traumatic experience of reality.

Swift’s texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. This study charts the entire trajectory of Swift’s engagement with the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of navigating a post-traumatic condition, proceeding from an emphasis on denial in his early work, through an intense preoccupation with the demands of trauma in the “middle-period” novels (including Waterland), to a seemingly liberating insistence on regeneration and renewal in Last Orders and The Light of Day.

By providing a wide-ranging and in-depth analysis of Swift’s novels against the background of the “ethical turn” in literary studies and the emergence of trauma theory, this book extends and enriches our understanding of what is arguably one of the most significant literary oeuvres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This essay explores the problem of society's environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and cultural works to counteract it. It uses the concepts of environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome to argue that our connection to the natural world has been eroded by our severely limited experience of it. Each generation's perception of what is "normal" in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objective standard. As a result, we forget what we have lost and do not realise the full extent of environmental degradation that has occurred over time. People's baseline expectations of the state of the environment are constantly being reset to a lower level as they are born into a world with fewer resources and a more degraded environment than the generation before. The essay examines two case studies to illustrate how creative works can play a vital role in reversing these trends and curing our planetary amnesia: The Lost Words: A Spell Book and its sequel The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and What Is Missing?, an interactive digital project by Maya Lin.

Klimaatrechtvaardigheid speelt doorgaans geen prominente rol in internationale politieke discussies zoals VN-klimaattoppen, waar economische en technische maatregelen voor mitigatie en adaptatie de gesprekken beheersen. Het adjectief ‘global’ in ‘global warming’, de opwarming van de aarde, impliceert dat de hele wereld wordt beïnvloed door klimaatverandering, en wetenschappelijke rapporten zoals die van het Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), het VN-klimaatpanel, focussen op de gemiddelde stijging van de mondiale temperatuur. We zitten allemaal in hetzelfde schuitje, zo lijkt het wel.

Maar in werkelijkheid is dat natuurlijk niet zo: er is grote ongelijkheid in de mondiale verdeling van verantwoordelijkheid en kwetsbaarheid voor klimaatverandering. Diegenen die het minst verantwoordelijk zijn voor klimaatverandering worden het hardst getroffen door de gevolgen ervan. Het Westen, dat historisch gezien verantwoordelijk is voor de meeste uitstoot van broeikasgassen, is het minst kwetsbaar; het Globale Zuiden is het meest kwetsbaar. Naast geografische locatie zijn ras, gender en socio-economische status bepalende factoren voor kwetsbaarheid voor klimaatverandering: mensen van kleur, vrouwen en mensen in armoede lopen meer kans om getroffen te worden dan witte mensen, mannen en rijke mensen.

In dit artikel zal ik de manier bespreken waarop de literatuur en de literatuurstudie omgaan met kwesties van klimaatrechtvaardigheid, na die eerst te kaderen binnen de ruimere theorievorming rond het antropoceen. De focus zal niet uitsluitend liggen op teksten die verschillen in verantwoordelijkheid en kwetsbaarheid voor klimaatverandering expliciet thematiseren maar evenzeer op teksten die ze schijnbaar of effectief uit de weg gaan. Aan de hand van de casus van een door mij gedoceerd mastervak over de literaire verbeelding van de klimaatcrisis zal ik een lans breken voor een geëngageerd literatuuronderzoek en -onderwijs die actief bijdragen aan het nastreven van klimaatrechtvaardigheid.

This working paper presents a multifaceted examination of four innovative impact projects that address the challenge of memorializing the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch characterized by massive human influence on the planet. Authored by four members of the "Transformation of the Environment" working group of the Slow Memory COST Action, it delves into diverse initiatives spanning the realms of art, museum curation, commemoration, and tourism. Each project offers a distinct and unique approach to getting the public to engage with the realities, complexities, and complicities of living in a time of climate and ecological crisis.

This essay discusses a graduate course at Ghent University on the literary imagination of the climate crisis that pays particular attention to the ways in which creative writers address inequalities in the global distribution of responsibility for and vulnerability to climate change in their work. A selection of recent humanities scholarship theorizing climate change and its cultural framings and impacts provides a background for the analysis of a wide range of literary responses across different genres, from novels and short stories to graphic novels, poems, and plays. The essay focuses specifically on how questions of climate justice continually guide and inform classroom discussions, shedding light not only on texts that explicitly engage with such concerns but also, and perhaps especially, on texts that largely evade them.

This essay seeks to demonstrate the value of different guilt-ridden and grief-stricken cultural forms and social practices in helping us develop a new emotional literacy to navigate the challenges of environmental breakdown and collective responsibility. It examines three case studies – Octavia Cade’s novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Chris Jordan’s documentary film Albatross and the self-immolation of David Buckel – that illustrate the complex interplay between environmental guilt and grief, showing how these emotions can serve as motivators for positive change and contribute to ecological attunement. The essay emphasises the importance of moving beyond individualised guilt to a collective understanding of environmental responsibility and offers insights into the potential of guilt and grief to drive meaningful action in addressing the ecological crisis.

Verdriet, angst, wanhoop, schuldgevoelens en woede: geconfronteerd met de klimaatcatastrofe spelen verschillende emoties op, maar die krijgen vooralsnog weinig plaats en erkenning in de samenleving. Kunstenaars en activisten ontwikkelen ondertussen rouwpraktijken. Die zijn niet zaligmakend, maar wel noodzakelijk om voorbij het collectieve ontwijkingsgedrag te geraken.

The essay explores the roots, growth, and impact of the Mnemonics network, an international collaborative initiative aimed at providing doctoral training in memory studies. Since 2012, Mnemonics has organized an annual rotating summer school centred around specific themes in memory studies. The essay discusses the network’s grassroots origins, the way it operates, its efforts to maintain openness, and the factors that account for its endurance. Acknowledging the challenges of expansion and inclusivity, it concludes by reflecting on how Mnemonics seeks to embody the true spirit of academia by nurturing intellectual growth and fostering collaboration and mutual support.

The Anthropocene, the new geological epoch defined by the transformative impact of human activity on the planet, has seen a dramatic increase in the pace, scope, and severity of various kinds of environmental degradation, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Moreover, according to a plethora of bleak scientific reports, these trends show little sign of abating, boding ill for the future of humanity and life on Earth in general. The experience and anticipation of environmental loss-whether of plant and animal species, ecosystems, landscapes, or an inhabitable planet-cause profound sorrow, which is being felt more and more acutely by a growing portion of the world's population as we move ever deeper into the Anthropocene. However, as yet, we are somewhat at a loss as to how to adequately navigate the affective terrain of environmental breakdown. Lacking standard protocols and procedures, we do not quite know how to make sense of, channel, or cope with its psychological impact.

This essay will explore how literature, and art more generally, serves as a cultural laboratory for articulating and dealing with grief related to environmental loss, which remains largely unspoken and unrecognized. The act of naming the often disenfranchised and marginalized forms of grief arising from environmental loss is a major step in bringing them to public awareness and granting them social acceptance and legitimacy so that they can be processed more effectively. Coming to terms with ecological grief can inspire efforts to work through it and reinvigorate practices of environmental advocacy in the face of the daunting ecological challenges confronting global society in the twenty-first century.

The essay consists of three parts. First, I will explain why the very idea of ecological mourning meets with strong resistance in some quarters. I will go on to discuss the phenomenon of glacier funerals, which has helped ecological mourning overcome that resistance and go mainstream in recent years. I will end by discussing a newly published novella that offers a profound meditation on its perils, pitfalls, and possibilities: The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade.

De vroege eenentwintigste eeuw zag een golf van literaire teksten waarin de klimaatverandering centraal staat. Dit artikel bespreekt wat tegenwoordig klimaatfictie of "cli-fi" wordt genoemd als een alternatieve vorm van klimaatcommunicatie, omarmd niet alleen door literatuurliefhebbers maar ook door wetenschappers en activisten die tegen de grenzen van het informatietekort-model aanlopen in hun pogingen om bewustwording en gedragsverandering te bewerkstelligen. Bijzondere aandacht wordt besteed aan de opkomende trend van hoopvolle, utopische klimaatverhalen als tegenwicht voor de dominantie van het post-apocalyptische genre, waarvan de effectiviteit steeds meer ter discussie staat.

The increasing visibility of climate change and scientists’ alarming warnings about it are taking a toll on people’s mental well-being. This essay surveys the culturally resonant repertoire of new coinages that have emerged in recent years to name and communicate environmentally induced distress. It pays particular attention to the concept of pre-traumatic stress disorder, which has become the focus of a small but important body of humanistic scholarschip calling for an expanded trauma theory that would be future- as well as past-oriented. Noting trauma theory’s persistent human-centredness, the essay goes on to consider attempts that are being made to reconceptualize trauma in non-anthropocentric terms and to acknowledge the interconnectedness and entanglement of human and non-human traumas. It ends by predicting that cultural trauma research, which has so far shown relatively little interest in environmental issues in general and climate change in particular, will engage more fully with our dire environmental predicament in the years ahead.

In a range of environmentally oriented international novels, future cities in the Low Countries have been flooded, with Dutch populations relocated to higher grounds or to floating cities. In contemporary Dutch and Flemish fiction, however, reflections on cities by the water are few and far between. More conspicuously, in the few literary novels that imagine cities under threat from rising water levels, the cities in question are not located on the shore but further inland, gesturing towards other meanings and symbolical repercussions rather than towards an engagement with flooding per se. This article examines two contemporary flood novels: Roderik Six's Vloed ("Flood") and Renate Dorrestein's Weerwater. We approach the floods in these novels in terms of indeterminate allegory, examining the contradictory meanings that can be attributed to the radical upheavals recounted in these narratives.

In recent years, scholarship on transnational or transcultural memory has become more clear-eyed about the limitations of remembering across national or cultural boundaries. The initial euphoria has dampened: critics these days are more likely to draw attention to factors that impede the flows of memory than to naïvely celebrate mnemonic mobility. Even so, contemporary memory research holds on to the ethical potential of transnational and transcultural paradigms of remembrance.

Récemment, la recherche sur la mémoire transnationale ou transculturelle est devenue plus lucide quant aux limites de la mémoire au-delà des frontières nationales ou culturelles. L’euphorie initiale s’est estompée: les critiques de nos jours sont plus susceptibles d’attirer l’attention sur les facteurs qui entravent les flux de mémoire que de célébrer naïvement la mobilité mémorielle. Toutefois, la recherche contemporaine sur la mémoire conserve le potentiel éthique des paradigmes mémoriels transnationaux et transculturels.

This essay gives an overview of the central themes and formal features of Jeff Nichols’s cli-fi film Take Shelter (2011). It also provides insight into the film’s reception and contribution to public debate, as well as offering some teaching ideas.

In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Our analysis challenges many of the assumptions with regard to affect that dominate the field of human rights and literature, which often takes for granted the intricate and treacherous process that undergirds a reader’s engagement with testimonial narratives. Affective engagement with the reader is a key feature of Eggers’s works, yet we show how it operates in a way that actively shapes the affective tenets of human rights culture in order to allow the reader to engage with the disempowered on more equal terms.

Since the end of the twentieth century, strike-capable military drones have rapidly evolved from an ominous near-future technology, seldom discussed outside of science fiction or top-secret military contexts, to a burgeoning multi-billion dollar international industry at the centre of public scrutiny and interest. Meanwhile, the figure of the drone has saturated Western public consciousness to the point that it can be described as a trope. Sparking the interest of artists, writers, and filmmakers, drone warfare has begun to feature in a wide range of films, books, and art installations, and this flood of drone-related media seems unlikely to peter out. To date, however, little academic work has looked in depth at cultural interpretations of drones and the role they serve in fictional(ized) narratives. What is urgently needed to better our understanding of the drone, we argue, is a cultural studies perspective that is able to assess the drone as a fictional, narrative construct, while still taking account of its very real, material consequences for both pilots and victims. This article aims to introduce readers to the nascent field of drone fiction, providing a jumping-off point for future research into the figure of the drone. Here, we explore how drone warfare is mediated through three different drone-fictional works: the semi-autobiographical book The Drone Eats with Me by Atef Abu Saif, the experimental video game Unmanned by Molleindustria, and the short film 5,000 Feet Is the Best by Omer Fast. Through close readings of these varied works, we draw attention to what each particular mode of mediation reveals about the effects of drones on those who work with or live around them.

Stef Craps is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI). He is an internationally recognised scholar whose research focuses on postcolonial literatures, trauma theory, transcultural Holocaust memory, and, more recently, climate change fiction. He has published widely on these issues, including in the seminal Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He visited Warwick to deliver a public lecture and graduate workshop for the Warwick Memory Group in October 2017. In a wide-ranging interview, Stef Craps spoke about present and future directions in memory and trauma studies, the differences between transnational and transcultural memories, the ethics and politics of memory (studies), and the challenges faced by the field looking to the future.

Het Antropoceen is geen puur geologische aangelegenheid. Het concept mag dan wel uit de koker van “harde” wetenschappers zijn ontsproten; het zorgt ook voor grote bedrijvigheid bij “zachte” wetenschappers en cultuurmakers. Zij worstelen met de morele en existentiële vragen die het tijdperk van de mens oproept.

This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), George Turner’s novel The Sea and Summer (1987), and Jan Zalasiewicz’s popular science book The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (2008) all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change. These works can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene—an era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualization— to consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking. Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses. Climate fiction of the future-history variety—which mourns future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass in the first place—presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.

This roundtable brings together a group of academics and artists working throughout Europe to discuss the question of memory in theoretical and artistic contexts at a historical moment highly preoccupied with acts of commemoration and moving memory.

Convened by Charlotte McIvor and Emilie Pine
Participants: Stef Craps, Ghent University;
Astrid Erll, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main;
Paula McFetridge, Kabosh Productions;
Ann Rigney, Utrecht University;
Dominic Thorpe, artist

That an empathic response to testimonies can lead to altruism is a key assumption of much cultural research on trauma and witnessing, which prides itself on its ethical commitment. Most trauma theorists also agree that empathy is to be distinguished from forms of affective involvement that do not recognize and respect the otherness of the other, and which are variously referred to as sympathy, projective identification, incorporation, or crude empathy. While this caveat against imperialism and appropriation is meant to prevent empathy from turning into a closed-loop process, canonical trauma theory itself has been plagued by Eurocentrism from its inception, as it tends not to adequately address the sufferings of members of non-Western or minority groups. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges that transcultural witnessing poses for empathic understanding and ethical thinking, using both theoretical and literary texts as examples, and focusing specifically on Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. Published by McSweeney’s in 2006, What Is the What, subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, is a collaborative first-person testimony that tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war. I argue that in this book Eggers manages both to stay true to the continuing cultural demand for empathy with distant others and to defuse or counter the prevailing scepticism about the morality of empathic identification that tends to find such efforts hopelessly wanting. What Is the What does not resolve all the moral ambiguities surrounding transcultural witnessing, but it is unafraid to confront them and refuses to be paralysed by them. The novel harnesses feeling in the face of suffering while continually reminding the reader that Deng’s experiences are not his or hers to inhabit. Rather than solidifying an already existing community, it calls a community of otherwise distant and disconnected people into being for the purposes of alleviating suffering.

Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory—an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the “ethical turn” affecting the humanities in the 1990s—is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. In this chapter, I take issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, and to favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma. I contend that the suffering engendered by colonialism and its aftermath needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, and in its own terms if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. I illustrate this argument—developed at greater length in my book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)—with a case study of a literary text that seems to me to call for a more inclusive, materialist, and politicized form of trauma theory. Published in 2010 to great critical acclaim, Aminatta Forna’s novel The Memory of Love examines how survivors of the Sierra Leone Civil War cope with the physical and psychological scars of those years. One of its protagonists is a British psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder who is volunteering with the stretched mental health services in Freetown in 2001, and who brings familiar Western ideas to the problems of the local population that he has been parachuted in to help solve. The novel is marked by a profound ambivalence about the applicability and viability of Western treatment methods in post-Civil War Sierra Leone. While there is a measure of closure for some characters, The Memory of Love—a fine example of literary realism—also awakens its readers to the chronic, ongoing suffering endured in silence by whole swathes of the population, in the face of which narrative therapy is an inadequate response. Thus, Forna’s novel can be seen to pose a challenge to trauma theory to remove its Eurocentric blinkers—a challenge, I argue, that the field would be well advised to embrace.

This chapter discusses attempts to theorize the interrelatedness of the Holocaust and other histories of victimization against the background of, firstly, the recent broadening of the focus of the field of memory studies from the national to the transnational level, and, secondly, efforts to bridge a disciplinary divide between Jewish and postcolonial studies preventing the Holocaust and histories of slavery and colonial domination from being considered in a common frame. In so doing, it highlights the pitfalls as well as the possibilities of bringing different atrocities into contact, a challenging and often controversial endeavour that holds both perils and promises. Next, it explores the ways in which the Native American writer Sherman Alexie negotiates various comparative perspectives on the Holocaust in “The Game between the Jews and the Indians Is Tied Going into the Bottom of the Ninth Inning” (1993), a sonnet-length poem that considers Jews and Native Americans as similarly oppressed ethnic minorities, and “Inside Dachau” (1996), a long, meditative poem that describes a Native American’s reflections on visiting the site of a former Nazi concentration camp.

This chapter explores the role of Holocaust memory in Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, a short play written in response to Israel’s 2008-2009 attack on Gaza. Controversially, the play invokes the memory of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews to criticize Israeli violence against the Palestinians. To accuse Seven Jewish Children of anti-Semitism for allegedly equating Jews with Nazis, though, is to ignore the play’s complexity, multivocality, and indeterminacy. Seven Jewish Children does not deny the narrative of Jewish victimization but undermines the assumption that Jews have a monopoly on victimhood. The memory of Jewish suffering is mobilized in the service of a politics that seeks to diminish suffering universally.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Professor Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta) and Professor Kate Rigby (Bath Spa University)
Confirmed writers: Gisèle Bienne and Francesca Melandri

Since the 1980s, environmental issues have occupied an increasingly central place in contemporary fiction. While the relationship between humans and nature has always played an important role in Western literature, from Theocritus to Thoreau, the ecological awareness of threats to the balance of the biosphere is a relatively recent phenomenon that has penetrated society and the literary imagination alike. The notion of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch characterized by the impact of human activities, has become established as a category of the literary imagination, while nature has come to the fore as an autonomous narrative force, no longer readable exclusively as a reflection of the subject’s emotions. In this regard, Lawrence Buell (1995), one of the founders of ecocriticism, writes that an environmental text is one where “the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.” This implies a non-anthropocentric logic, one that is no longer preoccupied solely with human interests. The ethical dimension involved in this approach demands renewed attention to the referentiality of literature, and indeed to literary commitment, also in contexts—such as that of France—marked by self-reflexive formalist experimentalism in the postwar period (Schoentjes 2015).

The aim of this conference is to investigate the impact of ecological awareness on the literary imagination and the new connections it establishes in our individual and collective representations of what is commonly referred to as “nature” or “the environment.” A transnational mapping of environmental literatures—or ecological fictions, a name one could perhaps give to the most “committed” texts—that can account for their characteristics and objectives still largely remains to be carried out. All types of literary fiction in English, French, German, and Italian can be explored within a global perspective that is also attentive to the circulation of literary works. In the spirit of ecopoetics, particular attention will be afforded the study of formal elements used to narrativize these issues, and more generally to the literary specificity of this cultural trend (Scaffai 2017).

The literary studies stream takes up the theme of decolonization, which has attracted renewed attention in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Cape Town and Oxford. Contestations over the legacies of European colonialism have begun to coalesce around calls to “decolonize” public spaces, institutions, curricula, and forms of knowledge. Decolonization is understood here as a process of challenging the cultural forces that had helped maintain the colonial system and that remain even after the formal end of colonial rule. English departments have been a frequent target of decolonization protests in recent years, with students at universities such as Cambridge and Yale urging faculty to diversify the English literature curriculum in highly-publicized campaigns. We invite papers that explore issues of decolonization in relation to (the teaching of) literatures in English, whether in terms of processes of canon (de)formation, the development of decolonizing reading practices, questions of diversity and equity addressed in specific literary texts, the contemporary resonance of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seminal Decolonising the Mind and other key theoretical works, or the pedagogical implications of adopting a decolonizing stance in the literature classroom. Presenters are encouraged but not required to reflect on the significance and relevance of the Belgian historical and educational contexts in their papers.

This special issue aims to explore the myriad ways in which environmental change wreaks havoc on the human psyche by bringing together essays on a wide range of psychological and affective responses to our dire environmental predicament. We welcome contributions from a variety of disciplines on the manifold theorizations, manifestations, and representations of ecological grief and cognate emotions pervading contemporary culture, as well as on attempts to counter, overcome, or cope with these feelings, or to leverage them for positive action on behalf of the environment. Contributors are asked to be attentive to the role played by issues of race, gender, class, and geopolitical location in determining how ecological grief is experienced, expressed, and managed.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250-300 words, and a short author bio describing previous and current research that relates to the special issue theme. Please submit your proposal as a single Microsoft Word file to stef.craps@ugent.be by 1 January 2019. Full essays are due by 1 September 2019, and the special issue will come out in winter 2019. Manuscripts must be prepared according to the author guidelines posted on the journal’s website. For inquiries, please contact stef.craps@ugent.be.

Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD scholarship in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium, tenable for a period of up to four years. The successful candidate will participate in the research project “Literature, Nature, and Ecology: An Ecopoetic Approach to Contemporary Narrative Prose in English, French, German, and Italian,” supported by a GOA grant from Ghent University’s research council and directed by Professors Benjamin Biebuyck, Stef Craps, Pierre Schoentjes, and Sabine Verhulst.

The project, which will employ four PhD students and one postdoctoral research fellow, will explore the role of the literary imagination, with a special focus on textual complexity and the tension between the global nature of ecological problems and culturally specific issues. Adopting a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparative perspective, it aims to examine the ways in which the literary imagination is deployed to forge new cultural connections with nature and the environment in a world in which ecological awareness occupies an increasingly prominent place.

Working under the primary supervision of Prof. Stef Craps, the PhD student to be hired will mainly research contemporary environmental fiction in English within the remit of the project, which will address topics such as questions of literary form, representations of the other-than-human, conceptualizations of housing, perambulatory environmental experiences, ecological disruption, and the narrativization of scientific knowledge. Candidates are welcome to propose a project of their own that falls within this broad scope.


Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD scholarship in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium, tenable for a period of up to four years. The successful candidate will participate in the research project “Imagining Climate Change: Fiction, Memory, and the Anthropocene,” sponsored by a grant from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) and directed by Prof. Stef Craps. S/he will research Anglophone climate change fiction within the context of the project’s three interrelated strands. The first, formalist strand explores the literary innovations demanded by climate change, a phenomenon whose magnitude and complexity challenge conventional modes of representation. The second, historicist strand links climate change fiction to literary responses to earlier crises that radically altered humanity’s relationship to the past, present, and future: the discovery of geological time in the early nineteenth century and the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. The third, postcolonial strand investigates to what extent and in what ways climate change fiction addresses inequalities in the global distribution of responsibility for and vulnerability to climate change, which the developing Anthropocene narrative risks obscuring.