Beatrijs Vanacker
Bio
​My research interests include the history of literary translation, (female) authorship, and the relationship between literature and cultural identity formation in the long eighteenth century.
My doctoral dissertation dealt with cultural transfer strategies in relation to a poetics of the novel in the Enlightenment. My first FWO postdoctoral project drew on discourse analysis, translation and reception theory to analyze the forms and functions of French 18th-century pseudotranslations and their reception from a comparative perspective. In my second FWO postdoc, I applied network theory and cultural transfer theory to examine the use of transcultural networks (through letters and translations) in the construction of female authorship (1760-1830).
As a postdoc, I was also a visiting research fellow at LMU (Munich) and Augsburg University in 2013 and at McGill University (Montreal) in 2017.
I am co-editor (with Nathalie Kremer) of the series La République des Lettres at Peeters Publishers.
At KU Leuven, I am head of the French Department and head of the Research Group "French, Italian and Spanish literatures".
From 2019 until 2024, I was a member of the Belgian Young Academy (Jonge Academie).
Education
I studied Romance languages (French, Italian) at KU Leuven (Bachelor's in 2002 and Master's in 2004) and obtained an additional teaching qualification (secondary education). I then earned my PhD in French literature at the same faculty in 2010.
Academic position
As of October 2025, I am a full-time Associate Professor at KU Leuven, where I teach courses on French literature, European Literature and literary translation theory.