Projects
Human and Non-human Interaction in Oral Narratives: Ecocritical analyses of Oromo Fables Ghent University
This project approaches Oromo oral fables from Ethiopia from different ecocritical perspectives. In particular, we aim to critically question the notions of anthropomorphism and limitrophes through analyses of the interaction between human and non-human characters. Fables offer a unique opportunity to do so, and the study can be an important contribution to debates on Oromo oral literature, ecocritical analysis and zoopoetics.
Negotiating the making of new types of families, parents and family relations: a normative and empirical analysis Ghent University
Alternative modes for family creation, e.g. connection websites for people searching gametes or co-parents, offer stakeholders the opportunity to set new conditions and make their own arrangements concerning conception and upbringing. This study will uncover the stakeholders’ moral reasoning (e.g. criteria for parenthood) and the moral structure of these new families, and
develop new concepts of parenthood with related ...
Exploring the dialectic relation between narrative and context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective: the case of World War II-testimonies KU Leuven
It is only recently that interactional sociolinguists have increasingly scrutinized the dialectic relation between the local level of narrative as an interactional accomplishment and the surrounding socio-cultural context and its big D-discourses (= socially accepted ways of thinking and acting). This is also thanks to positioning analysis (Bamberg 1997), which links the local levels 1 and 2 (viz. storyworld and storytelling world) to a more ...
The malleability narrative in contemporary media: Its content and consequences for adolescents’ identity development KU Leuven
Although progress has been made in explaining how media dynamics influence adolescent identity, there has been insufficient theory to fully grasp the processes that explain and predict these relationships. The proposed research aims to help addressing this major gap by unfolding an interdisciplinary understanding of how mediated ideals operate, i.e., the malleability narrative. More precisely, I aim to describe the manifestation of multiple, ...
Writing on the Verge: a Narratological Approach to Hugo Claus’s Novels as Rewritings of Popular Narrative Patterns Ghent University
This research project focusses on the interaction between popular and elite culture and the systematic rewriting of popular narrative patterns in Hugo Claus’s novels. Starting from a narratological analysis and Moraru’s concept rewriting (2001), this project presents a detailed analysis of five novels and, taking this as a starting point, then shed light on the evolution in Claus’s writing.
A people that does not remember its past has no future': the governmental historical and identity narrative in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan (1982 to 2019). Vrije Universiteit Brussel
During the last decades, instrumentalization of the past and identity formation have become an integral aspect of much domestic and international policy-making in Eastern ...
The Romance between Greece and the West. Heroes and Heroines in French, Anglo-Norman and English medieval narrative. Ghent University
This project reconstructs and interprets the persistence of (ancient) novelistic and (late antique and medieval) hagiographical traditions in vernacular medieval romance. Narratological and rhetorical analyses trace diachronic continuities and synchronic differentiation in the characterization of heroes. The study can thus enhance our knowledge about the medieval reception of ancient narrating strategies and the literary complexities of an ...
Narrative, Metaphor and Metamorphosis: The Environmental Potential of Contemporary Children’s Literature Ghent University
This project, where children’s literature studies, ecocriticism and cognitive criticism intersect, investigates on both the macro-level of narrative and the micro-level of style how children’s literature responds to the imaginative challenges brought on by the Anthropocene. Understanding the environmental potential of children’s literature contributes to a better understanding of the complex intergenerational challenges (i.e. climate change) ...