Scientific Committee

Prof. Dr. Maheen Ahmed (Ghent University)

Maheen 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. 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.