Research

FWO project

Shaping Belgian Literature (2019-2024)

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See the general description on our website. 

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This project examines literary culture in the Southern Low Countries during a formative period in the history of Belgium (1750-1830). In the historiography of the Low Countries, eighteenth-century literature – especially as it was created and received in the Southern part – remained largely unexplored. More importantly, in previous research, the multilingual and hybrid character of this literature has been mostly neglected. Researchers indeed tend to explore either Flemish or Francophone texts. This project addresses the cross-fertilization between different cultures and literatures that this hybrid and multilingual contact zone allowed to happen. To do this, we will mainly focus on literary journals and examine how they document and value but also help to nurture processes of cultural transfer and literary exchange in a crucial time, leading up to the nation’s independence.

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C1 (KU Leuven Research Fund project)

Found in Translation. Translators and the Construction of Literary Authority in the 18th-Century Low Countries. (2021-2025)

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Through the lens of translators, this project seeks to shed new light on the construction of authority in the literary field of the 18th-century Low Countries. It will compare, for the first time, the Southern and Northern Netherlands in a large-scale systematic study of the previously overlooked but substantial share of translations. Combining quantitative data analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we will innovatively chart the performative agency of translators on three levels: 1) the macro-level of the literary field in which translators strive to acquire an established position; 2) the meso-level of translator types (hackwriters, debutants and women writers) and 3) the micro-level of specific agents and their careers. In doing so, the project tests the hypothesis that 18th-century literary translations were actively used in practices of self-representation and authority building. By shifting the focus to these long neglected and presumably 'non-original' works, this project not only proposes a new and historical perspective on literary career building but also drastically revises Netherlandish literary historiography.

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