Organising Committee
Eline Batsleer (Ghent University)
Eline Batsleer is a PhD Candidate in Italian Literature at the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, where she obtained her master’s degrees in Linguistics and Literature: French-Italian (2020) and Comparative Modern Literature (2021). From October 2020 until April 2021 she worked as an intern at the ERC-project Agents of Change: Women Editors and Socio-Cultural Transformation in Europe, 1710-1920 (acronym WeChangEd). Her current research project is funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and focuses on the rhetorical construction of female identity during the Great War in Italy. Her research interests lie primarily in literary history and early-twentieth century Italian literature, with a particular focus on First World War literature and the female voices of the period.
Dr. Sarah Bonciarelli (Ghent University)
Sarah Bonciarelli (PhD University of Siena) is a language lector in the Italian studies section at UGent. She was a member of the MDRN research group of the University of Leuven (2011-2015) and professeur invité at the UCL Louvain (2019/2020; 2020/2021).
Among her most recent publications: “What can silence tell us. Centomila nessuno between Pirandello and Beckett” in Rivista di Estetica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2022; “Dai paesaggi su carta alle città scolpite. Il progetto artistico de Le città invisibili” in Calvino, Tabucchi, le voyage de la traduction, Thea Rimini ed., Presses Universitaire de Provence, 2022; “Dovrei andar vestito peggio, costruzione della favola biografica ne I Diari di Prezzolini” in Gentes. Rivista di Scienze Umane e sociali, 2021; Literature as Document. Generic Boundaries in 1930s Western Literature (with Anne Reverseau and Carmen van den Bergh (Leiden, Brill, 2019).
Cato Defoer (Ghent University)
Cato Defoer studies Linguistics and Literature: German-Italian at Ghent University. She holds a bachelor’s degree and is now in her final semester of the master’s program. Her main focus is on contemporary German literature, specifically on anthropocentric and melancholic topics. Her bachelor’s thesis explored high sensitivity and psychosis in German and Dutch literature, while her master’s thesis analyses the concept of liminality through a study of the senses in the work of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She is working as an intern at the Uses of Modernism conference as part of a scheduled advanced master’s programme in Comparative Modern Literature (2023-2024)
Dr. Guylian Nemegeer (Ghent University)
Guylian Nemegeer is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and the Academia Belgica. He wrote a PhD dissertation on the symbolisation of the Renaissance in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s cultural nationalism. His research mainly focuses on the discourses and ideologies that shaped French and Italian literature and culture from the late 19th-century onwards. More specifically, he investigates the interaction between national identity discourses and ideas of Europe in the run-up to the First World War. He is also interested in contemporary European authors’ politics of literature, especially in relation to right-wing discourses and European identity. His work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals, including The Italianist, Romance Quarterly, Forum Italicum, Language and Literature, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Prof. Dr. Mara Santi (Ghent University)
Mara Santi is associate professor of Italian Literature at Ghent University where she was appointed in 2008 after having worked at Basel University (2002-2005) and at Zurich University (2005-2008). She graduated in Italian philology at the University of Pavia where she also wrote her PhD thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio. She teaches BA courses on the history of Italian literature, on Italian culture and on contemporary Italian prose and MA courses on short story collection theory. Her main research interests lie in modern and contemporary Italian narrative, narratology, philology, and literary theory. She is particularly interested in authors who have greatly influenced Italian culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all Gabriele d’Annunzio, Italo Svevo and Carlo Emilio Gadda. She is an active researcher on recent developments in contemporary Italian literature.
Prof. Dr. Tiziano Toracca (University of Udine)
Tiziano Toracca is Visiting Professor at the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. He graduated in Law and in Italian Language and Literature. He got a Joint PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature and in Literary Studies at the University of Perugia and at the University of Ghent (2017). He coordinated the Jean Monnet Project I work therefore I am European at the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences of the University of Torino and he worked as research fellow at CAS SEE of the University of Rijeka. His research focuses on Italian Contemporary Literature, Modernism and Neomodernism, literature and labour. He is member of the Center for European Modernism Studies and of the Italian Society for Law and Literature and he is editor of the Journal «Allegoria».
Prof. Dr. Massimiliano Tortora (Sapienza University of Rome)
Massimiliano Tortora is Associate Professor in Contemporary Italian Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is editor-in-chief of ‘L’Ellisse. Studi storici di Letteratura italiana” and “Allegoria. Per uno studio materialistico della letteratura”. He is also on the scientific committee of “Levia Gravia” and a member of the editorial board of “OBLIO”. Together with Annalisa Volpone, he directs the series “European Modernism” (Morlacchi editore), and is a member of the scientific committee of BITeS (Biblioteca Italiana Testi e Studi), of which he heads, together with Giancarlo Alfano and Paola Italia, the “Novecento” section. He is also on the scientific committee of “Scrittojo” (Prospero editore). Since 2015, he has been co-director (and co-founder together with Annalisa Volpone) of CEMS (Centre for European Modernism Studies), an international study centre that involves around twenty Italian and foreign universities and is devoted to the study of European modernism.
Prof. Dr. Bart Van den Bossche (KU Leuven)
Bart Van den Bossche is Professor of Italian Literature at the Department of Literary Studies. He teaches Italian literature and culture, with a special focus on the literary culture of contemporary Italy, literary-historical categories and canon formation, literature and modernity, international perspectives and intermediality. In 2010 Bart Van den Bossche together with four colleagues founded MDRN, a research group that studies European literature of the first half of the twentieth century from a variety of perspectives. Within the collective MDRN project ‘Literary Knowledge (1890-1950): Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe’, he is involved in research projects on historical and archaeological knowledge of ancient cultures in modernist literature and cosmology in the avant-garde. Another ongoing research project concerns the literary memory of the occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka) from 1919 to 1920, led by Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Dr. Cedric Van Dijck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Cedric Van Dijck is an FWO postdoctoral fellow in English Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is the author of Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War (Edinburgh UP, 2023), and a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (Edinburgh UP, 2023) and The Intellectual Response to the First World War (Sussex Academic, 2017).
Prof. Dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Birgit Van Puymbroeck is Assistant Professor in Literature in English and Research Methodology at VUB (tenure-track). Van Puymbroeck works on various aspects of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and culture. Her expertise includes modernism, network theory, transnational relations, periodical studies, print culture, radio studies and sound studies. Her first monograph Modernist Literature and European Identity was published by Routledge in 2020. In addition, her work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Language Review, Victorian Periodicals Review and the Journal of European Periodical Studies. Birgit Van Puymbroeck is affiliated with the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at VUB. She is the co-founder of the 20cc research group at Ghent University and a member of the interdisciplinary ‘Writing 1900‘ network.
Scientific Committee
Prof. Dr. Maaheen Ahmed (Ghent University)
Maaheen Ahmed is associate professor at Ghent University and principal investigator of the COMICS project. She obtained her PhD (with distinction) from Jacobs University Bremen in 2011. Since then, she has held postdoctoral positions at the Université catholique de Louvain (Marie Curie co-fund) and Ghent University (FWO). She often works on contemporary, alternative graphic novels and comics in English and in French. Her first book, Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2016. A second book, Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics is under contract with the same press. She has also co-edited volumes such as The Cultural Standing of Comics/Le statut culturel de la BD, with Stéphanie Delneste and Jean-Louis Tilleuil (Academia/L’Harmattan, 2017) and, most recently, Comics Memory with Benoît Crucifix (Palgrave, 2018).
Prof. Dr. Bart Eeckhout (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Bart Eeckhout is Full Professor of English and American Literature. He studied at Ghent University and Columbia University and taught at Fordham University and New York University. His main research areas are the writings of the modernist poet Wallace Stevens, LGBTIQ+ studies, and urban studies. Eeckhout has been Director of the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts since 2017 and is a Member of the Class of Humanities of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.
Prof. Dr. David Gullentops (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
David Gullentops is Professor of French Literature, of theory of literature and intermedial creativity at the Department of literature and languages of the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. He is Director of the interdisciplinary Emile Verhaeren Chair, the Emile Lorand Chair for French literature and the Scientific website Jean Cocteau. He is a specialist in the theory of poetic discourse and in the relationship between poetry and other forms of literary and artistic expression, such as film, theatre, music, songs, particularly in the work of Emile Verhaeren and Jean Cocteau. He has also published on Apollinaire, Dotremont, Maeterlinck, Michaux, Rodenbach and Tardieu, and has worked on the elaboration of a cognitive reading model that is suitable for the approach of hybrid art forms in the poetry of the twentieth century.
Prof. Dr. Bart Keunen (Ghent University)
Bart Keunen, PhD, is professor in Comparative Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches graduate and postgraduate courses in European Literary History, Sociology of Literature and Comparative Literature. He studied philosophy in Louvain and literary criticism in Ghent, Berlin and Klagenfurt. He obtained his Ph.D. degree with a dissertation on Representing the Metropolis: A Culture-Sociological Approach to City Images, Chronotopes and Artistic Projects in Literary Prose between 1850 and 1930 (Ghent, 1997). He is president of the Belgian Society for General and Comparative Literature (since September 2000) and co-director of the interdisciplinary Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST; since January 2002). He published articles on topics concerning urban studies, genre criticism, literary historiography and literary sociology in international journals and books.
Prof. Dr. Mara Santi (Ghent University)
Mara Santi is associate professor of Italian Literature at Ghent University where she was appointed in 2008 after having worked at Basel University (2002-2005) and at Zurich University (2005-2008). She graduated in Italian philology at the University of Pavia where she also wrote her PhD thesis on Gabriele d’Annunzio. She teaches BA courses on the history of Italian literature, on Italian culture and on contemporary Italian prose and MA courses on short story collection theory. Her main research interests lie in modern and contemporary Italian narrative, narratology, philology, and literary theory. She is particularly interested in authors who have greatly influenced Italian culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all Gabriele d’Annunzio, Italo Svevo and Carlo Emilio Gadda. She is an active researcher on recent developments in contemporary Italian literature.
Prof. Dr. Bart Van den Bossche (KU Leuven)
Bart Van den Bossche is Professor of Italian Literature at the Department of Literary Studies. He teaches Italian literature and culture, with a special focus on the literary culture of contemporary Italy, literary-historical categories and canon formation, literature and modernity, international perspectives and intermediality. In 2010 Bart Van den Bossche together with four colleagues founded MDRN, a research group that studies European literature of the first half of the twentieth century from a variety of perspectives. Within the collective MDRN project ‘Literary Knowledge (1890-1950): Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe’, he is involved in research projects on historical and archaeological knowledge of ancient cultures in modernist literature and cosmology in the avant-garde. Another ongoing research project concerns the literary memory of the occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka) from 1919 to 1920, led by Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Prof. Dr. Hans Vandevoorde (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Hans Vandevoorde teaches Dutch literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He is one of the coordinators of the Centre for the Study of Experimental Literature (CEL/SEL), member of the Steering Committee of the ENAG (an international research community on European Neo-Avant-Garde) and with Bart Eeckhout (UA) chief editor of the Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (CLW). He was chairman of the Centre for Literature, Intermediality and Culture (CLIC) till 2014. A sabbatical leave was granted for the year 2014-2015 and he was appointed on the Breughel Chair at the UPenn 2016. At this time, he supervises a FWO-project on diaries in the second world war and a PhD on art and literature (VUB). He published several volumes and articles on nineteenth century, fin the siècle and interbellum literature & culture, and on post-war poetry.
Prof. Dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Birgit Van Puymbroeck is Assistant Professor in Literature in English and Research Methodology at VUB (tenure-track). Van Puymbroeck works on various aspects of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and culture. Her expertise includes modernism, network theory, transnational relations, periodical studies, print culture, radio studies and sound studies. Her first monograph Modernist Literature and European Identity was published by Routledge in 2020. In addition, her work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Language Review, Victorian Periodicals Review and the Journal of European Periodical Studies. Birgit Van Puymbroeck is affiliated with the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at VUB. She is the co-founder of the 20cc research group at Ghent University and a member of the interdisciplinary ‘Writing 1900‘ network.
Dr. Pim Verhulst (Universiteit Antwerpen-University of Oxford)
Pim Verhulst is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Antwerp. He is an editorial board member of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which was awarded the MLA Prize for a Bibliography, Archive or Digital Project in 2018. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Genetic Joyce Studies, The Harold Pinter Review, Variants and La Revue des lettres modernes. Most recently, he has co-edited Radio Art and Music (Lexington 2020), Tuning in to the Neo-Avant Garde (Manchester UP 2021) and Music, Word and Sound in Radio Drama (Brill 2023). His latest monograph, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays, is coming out this year with Bloomsbury and University Press Antwerp.