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 Collateral , American Imago , Studies in the Novel , and Criticism on decolonizing English literature , art and climate change, e
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.