• Cluster 1: Michael Marder, Ben De Bruyn, Nadia Sels, Griet Moors
• Cluster 2: Gilbert Merlio, Eva Wiegmann, David Engels, Hannelore Roth
• Cluster 3: Holly Brown, Evelin Brosi, Elvis Bonier, Thomas Bellinck, David Clarke, Oliver Kohns
• Cluster 4: Anke Gilleir, Tom Lambeens, Hannelore Van Dijck, Charlotte Vanhoubroeck
• Cluster 5 & 6 (double edition): Idesbald Goddeeris, Bambi Ceuppens, Anne Reijniers, Rob Jacobs, Robert Aldrich, Filip Van Dingenen, Arne De Winde, Lieven Van Speybroeck, Ode de Kort, Chokri Ben Chikha, Action Zoo Humain
• Cluster 8 & 9 (double edition): Tom Chadwick, Michiel De Cleene, Dorothee Ostmeier, Stephen Rodgers, Chi Wang, Jeffrey Stolet
• Cluster 10: Florentina Holzinger, Gabriele Kämper, Eva Kreisky, Marion Löffler, Bart Philipsen
• Cluster 11—12: Pieter Vermeulen, Elke Van Kerckvoorde, Rolf Parr, Sophie Whetton
• Cluster 13: Ines Cox, Naomi Lubrich, Thomas Meinecke, Marylaura Papalas, Otto von Busch
• Cluster 14Volkmar Mühleis, Elvis Bonier, Nadia Sels, Tom Lambeens
• Cluster 15: Gry Ulstein, Sophie Pluim, Kahn Faassen, PieterVermeulen, Felix Bosschaert
• Cluster 16: Marco Caracciolo, Kaisa Kortekallio, Flor Maesen, Alison Sperling
• Cluster 19: François Levrau, Milo Rau, Daniel Castro Garcia, Maha El Hissi
• Cluster 20: Janine Hauthal, David Clarke, Heather Agyepong, Holly Brown
• Cluster 21: Thomas Decreus, Louise Hoon, Astrid Van Weyenberg, Thomas Lehr
• Cluster 22: Pieter Troch, Jaume Castan Pinos, Igor Drljača, Kris Van Heuckelom
• Cluster 23: Anke Bosma, Emily Ng, Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos
• Cluster 25: Nic Balthazar, Stef Craps, Alexander Devriendt, Moya De Feyter, Mahlu Mertens, Christel Stalpaert
• Cluster 26: Véronique Bragard, Stef Craps, Michaël Matthys, Mahlu Mertens, Laura Michiels, Ankhi Mukherjee, Gry Ulstein
• Cluster 29: Winnie Wong, Rika Dunlap, Tim Christiaens, Stéphane Symons
• Cluster 30: Lorelinde Verhees, Herman Siemens, Katia Hay, Aukje van Rooden, Erik Hagoort, Jean-Luc Nancy
• Cluster 31: Thomas McDonald, Helen Finch, Clemens Ruthner
• Cluster 32: Thomas Ernst, Irina Gradinari, Johannes Pause, Lieven Raeymaekers, Michiel Rys, Cleo Reniers
• Cluster 33: Danyil Zadorozhnyi, Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert, Daniil Galkin, Masha Ivasenko
• Cluster 35: Roel Griffioen (ed.), Sjoerd Leijten (ed.), Justin Bennet, Davide Tidoni, Salomé Voegelin
• Cluster 37: Charlotte Vanhoubroeck, Hanneke Grootenboer, Amelia Toelke, Anke Gilleir
• Cluster 38: Marius Kwint, Ine Meganck, Liesbeth den Besten, Charlotte Vanhoubroeck
• Cluster 39: Oriana Virone, Élise Deschambre, Dominique Mesa, Karel Vanhaesebrouck

Cluster 1

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He is the Associate Editor of Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought and the author of Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Phenomena-Critique-Logos: The Project of Critical Phenomenology (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust (2016).

Ben De Bruyn is associate professor of comparative literature at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He is the author of Wolfgang Iser. A Companion (De Gruyter, 2012) and co-editor of Literature Now. Key Terms and Methods for Literary History (Edinburgh UP, 2016). A member of the Benelux Association for the Study of Culture and the Environment (BASCE), he has also published on various environmental themes in journals like English Studies, Oxford Literary Review and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

Nadia Sels (1981) is lecturer of cultural history at the Faculty of Design Sciences of Antwerp University and lecturer of art history at PXL-MAD, School of Arts in Hasselt, where she is also a member of the research group FRAME. She obtained her PhD at Ghent University, where as a guest professor she teaches Classical Mythology and Greek Literature. She publishes on art, literature and mythology.

Griet Moors graduated as a civil engineer-architect at the University of Leuven (2002), before obtaining her Master of Fine Arts (Painting) at the PXL-MAD in Hasselt (2014). Currently she is working on a PhD in the Arts and a member of the FRAME research group (PXL-MAD & Hasselt University).

Cluster 2

Gilbert Merlio ist emeritierter Professor der Germanistik (Ideengeschichte) an der Sorbonne in Paris. Neben zahlreichen Aufsätzen über Kulturkritik, Spengler, die Konservative Revolution, den Nationalsozialismus sowie die Geschichte der Intellektuellen in Frankreich und Deutschland veröffentlichte er u.a. die Werke Linke und rechte Kulturkritik (2005), Spengler – Ein Denker der Zeitenwende (2009) und Spengler ohne Ende. Ein Rezeptionsphänomen im internationalen Kontext (2014).

Eva Wiegmann ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für deutsche Sprache, Literatur und für Interkulturalität an der Universität Luxemburg und arbeitet an ihrer Habilitation über das ästhetische Innovationspotential diachroner Interkulturalitätskonstellationen. Promotion an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf; anschließend FNR- und Marie-Curie-Actions-Stipendiatin an der Universität Luxemburg (Projekt: Fremdheitskonstruktionen in der Kulturkritik um 1900).

David Engels ist seit 2008 Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für römische Geschichte an der Université libre de Bruxelles und seit 2012 Direktor und Chefredakteur der altertumswissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift "Latomus". Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind römische Religion, hellenistischer Orient, Geschichtsphilosophie, Rezeptionsgeschichte. Zu seinen Buchpublikationen gehören u.a. La crise de l'Union européenne et la chute de la République romaine (2013), La Destruction dans l'histoire (2013), Religion and Competition in Antiquity (2014), Von Platon bis Fukuyama (2015), Eine Geschichte der Deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens, Bd. 1 (2016).

Hannelore Roth ist Literaturwissenschaftlerin an der KU Leuven (Fonds für Wissenschaftliche Forschung – Flandern). In ihrem Dissertationsprojekt erforscht sie das preußische Phantasma in der deutschen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts.

Cluster 3

Holly Brown is currently reading for a PhD in literature at Ghent University, prior to this she completed her MA in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her current project explores the recurring trope of the ill male subject in contemporary American fiction, tying these literary representations of physical fragmentation to contemporary biopolitical contexts and effects.

A sentence of sixty five letters describing the life and works of Evelin Brosi.

A sentence of sixty five letters describing the life and works of Elvis Bonier.

Thomas Bellinck (Recklinghausen, 1983) is a Brussels-based artist whose explorations into the realm of the “paradocumentary” range from theatre plays to film and installations. Flirting with alternative historiography, infused with humor, relying heavily on techniques of verbal and material quotation, his work often addresses different types and expressions of systemic violence. In 2015 he created Memento Park, a verbatim play tackling the commemoration of the Great War and the links between remembrance, politics, tourism and big business. Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo, his futuristic historical museum about life in the former European Union, was recently presented in Athens and is set to open in Wiesbaden later this Summer. Thomas is currently also working on Simple as ABC #2, a musical theatre piece on the logistics of social sorting. thomasbellinck.com

David Clarke is Senior Lecturer in German at University of Bath. bath.ac.uk

Oliver Kohns lehrt Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Luxemburg. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Literatur- und Medientheorie, die Literatur des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts sowie die Genealogie der Autorität. Weitere Informationen: uni.lu

Cluster 4

Anke Gilleir is professor of German literature and gender studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium). In her research she addresses women writers, literature and identity, aesthetics and politics.

Tom Lambeens maakt en spreekt over beelden. Als postdoctoraal onderzoeker is hij verbonden aan onderzoeksgroep FRAME en geeft hij les aan PXL-MAD. In 2013 verdedigde hij zijn doctoraat (UHasselt) waarin het concept ‘beeldende zwaartekracht’ centraal stond. Het ‘omzichtbare’ en het denkbeeldige zijn de onderzoeksthema's die hem momenteel bezighouden.

Hannelore Van Dijck studied Fine arts at Sint Lucas in Ghent. She implemented in-situ projects in many institutions. Examples include Sea at Croxhapox (Ghent), Le Plat Pays at Voorkamer (Lier), Only the wind’s home at Drawing Centre (Diepenheim), Wenn sich der Nebel hebt at Galerie Zink (Berlin), Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal at L40 (Berlin), Bozar (Brussels), Kunsthaus NRW (Kornelimünster).

Charlotte Vanhoubroeck is a jewellery artist and art historian who brings gradually fading heritage back to life in the contemporary art scene. After graduating at Ghent University, she was trained at d’Academie Sint-Niklaas (BE), Bishopsland Educational Trust (UK) and PXL-MAD School of Arts (BE). She is currently conducting a PhD in the Arts at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts, where she’s investigating and reactivating the lost sentimental jewellery of the first Belgian queen Louise-Marie d’Orléans. Her ‘Stilled Sentiments’ collection has made Charlotte VOCATIO Laureate 2020, was awarded a commendation for the BVK-Preis 2021 für Junges Kunsthandwerk 2021 and has won the Preziosa Prize 2021, the LAO Prize 2022 and the Inhorgenta Special Prize 2022.

Cluster 5 — 6

Idesbald Goddeeris is slavist en historicus. Hij doceert vakken rond koloniale geschiedenis, geschiedenis van Polen en geschiedenis van India, en is ook programmadirecteur van de opleiding Geschiedenis. Zijn onderzoek richt zich vooral op de relatie van onze samenleving met andere culturen en politieke regimes. Hij doet dat onder meer aan de hand van de geschiedenis van migratie, Europese identiteiten, transnationale sociale bewegingen, Oost-West en Noord-Zuid contacten, communistische inlichtingendiensten tijdens de Koude Oorlog, ontwikkelingssamenwerking, en postkoloniale herinnering. Hij was visiting fellow aan de London School of Economics (2009) en aan de University of Pennsylvania (2014) en doceerde de voorbije jaren onder meer ook aan de universiteiten van Delhi, Mumbai, Kinshasa, Krakow, Irkoetsk en Kolkata. Hij is ook senior member van het Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, waar hij de Leuven India Focus coördineert, en zetelt in het Expertpanel ‘Geschiedenis en Archeologie’ bij het Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO-Vlaanderen).

Bambi Ceuppens studeerde Afrikaanse Talen en Geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Gent en Culturele en Sociale Antropologie aan de KU Leuven vooraleer een PhD in Social Anthropology te behalen aan de University of St Andrews in Schotland. Ze was docente aan de universiteiten van Edinburgh, Manchester en St Andrews en postdoctoraal onderzoekster aan de UGent en de KU Leuven. Sinds 2007 werkt ze in het Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika. Ze is er senior researcher, beheert de collectie Congolese schilderijen en is wetenschappelijk commissaris (menswetenschappen) van de nieuwe permanente tentoonstelling. Ze cureerde de tentoonstellingen Indépendance! (2010) en Congo Art Works: Pouplar Painting (2016-2017). Ze verricht onder meer onderzoek naar autochtonie, de Congolese diaspora in België, het Congo-Belgische koloniale verleden, Congolese populaire cultuur en museumrepresentaties van Afrika en mensen van Afrikaanse origine.

Anne Reijniers (Belgium, 1992) graduated in 2014 in the Master of Audio-Visual Arts from LUCA – School of Arts Brussels. Her fiction film Looking at Marie was shown at amongst others EMAF (DE), OFFoff (BE) and Cinematek (BE). In an extra master at KASK Ghent in 2014-2016 she focused on documentary film. Starting from April 2015 she worked on the film Échangeur with Rob Jacobs (researcher at the University of Antwerp) in collaboration with art centre ‘Het Bos’ in Antwerp and the art festival ‘Kinact’ in Kinshasa, DRC.

Rob Jacobs (Belgium, 1989) gained his master’s degree in Film Studies and Visual Culture in 2013. Today, he works as a researcher, connected to the Visual & Digital Cultures Research Center of the University of Antwerp. In his PhD project he experiments with visual methods to study contested urban spaces. His main interest lies in contestations of official representations of colonialism in Belgian cities. In 2015 he collaborated with ‘Het Bos’ and 11 bachelor-students in a study of the life of ‘Place du Trône’, a square in Brussels that houses a statue of king Leopold II. In 2016 he co-organized the colloquium ‘The Iconography of Lumumba and the Work of Raoul Peck’ at Antwerp University, where he presented his work on the debate over naming a Brussels’ square after Patrice Lumumba.

Robert Aldrich is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney. He teaches and carries out research in modern European and colonial history, including the history of France since the Revolution, the history of the French and British overseas empires, the history of ‘sites of memory’ and the history of gender and sexuality. The French government has decorated Aldrich with the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in recognition of ‘services to French culture’. Book publications include Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchs and Overseas Empires (Manchester University Press, 2016), Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka: Sex and Serendipity (Routledge, 2014), The Routledge History of Western Empires (Routledge, 2013), Monuments et mémoires: Les traces colonials dans le paysage français (Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 2011), Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Filip Van Dingenen is a multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of the Ecole Mondiale in Brussels. He is currently PHD researcher at LUCA – School of Arts in Ghent/Brussels and affiliated researcher at the Laboratory of Education and Society at KU Leuven. In his process-based art practice he uses a broad range of different methods and outputs merging participatory strategies with a social and ecological relevance, in between leisure and education. The last years he worked extensively on zoological issues and observed the phenomena of zoo culture from different angles. With the Argentinian choreographer/dancer Barbara Pereyra he co-founded Fantaman Productions & Matelisto Contemporary Movements, a platform for developing projects in between performance and visual arts. He has written numerous articles for journals and magazines and has authored several artist books. His works and performances are presented at a.o. the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren (2013), Onomatopee Foundation, Eindhoven (2011), Galerie für Landschaftkunst, Hamburg (2011), Galway artcentre (2010), and Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro (2009).

Arne De Winde is lecturer and researcher at PXL-MAD – School of Arts (Hasselt) und LUCA – School of Arts (Ghent). From 2004 until 2016 he worked as a research fellow of the Funds for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO – Vlaanderen) at the Departement of Literary Studies (German Literature) of the University of Leuven. He has published on contemporary German literature (Reinhard Jirgl, Thomas Meinecke, Silke Scheuermann etc.), word & image interaction, the unbearable as aesthetic category, protest and performativity, the imagination of sports, 20th-century photography (and more particularly John G. Zimmerman), (the contemporary reception of) discourses of the Conservative Revolution, and more specifically Oswald Spengler. He is member of the editorial board of cultural magazine rekto:verso and co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of COLLATERAL.

Lieven Van Speybroeck is one half of Oliver Ibsen, Evelin Brosi, Elvis Bonier and Silvio Ebner, respectively a graphic designer, writer, visual artist, publisher and many in between and beyond.

Ode de Kort is a visual artist, who lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2015 she obtained a Master in Photography at KASK – School of Arts (Ghent). Her work proceeds from the constant search for the boundaries of the photography medium. She interfaces photographic images and fragile sculptures to explore the spatial potential of photography. This is reinforced by the meticulous, site-specific integration of her work into an exhibition space. She had numerous solo and group exhibitions in a.o. Pistoia (Spazio1 Gallery), Brussels (Hopstreet Gallery), Antwerp (Tique Art Space, Extra City Kunsthal), Ghent, Zürich, and Bielefeld.

Chokri Ben Chikha is an international performer/artistic director/researcher. He obtained a Master in History at Ghent University and accomplished additional trainings as theatre-maker, actor, dancer and choreographer. He has taught at several institutions: LUCA – School of Arts Ghent, RITS Brussel, Toneelacademie Maastricht, Universiteit Antwerpen. Since 2007 he is lecturer and researcher in arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Ghent (KASK). Between 2003-2008 he was artistic director, theater-maker and performer for the international performance group Union Suspecte. He interrupted his theatre activities in order to focus on a PhD in the Arts at KASK/UGent, entitled “What is the critical value to use stereotypes as signs in theatre? The ‘human zoo’ as a (re)search tool”. This research project made the link between colonial history and the post-colonial present by using the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the world exhibition in Ghent (1913). The research project gave rise to the foundation of the international performance company Action Zoo Humain (AZH) and the multidisciplinary performance The Truth Commission (2013).

Action Zoo Humain is the performance group of theatre-maker/performer/researcher Chokri Ben Chikha, theatre-maker/actor Zouzou Ben Chikha, visual artist/archeologist Sarah Eyckerman, business manager Hanne Boelaert & historian/photographer Carmen Van Praet. Along with this artistic and commercial core, the artistic team consists of Walid Ben Chikha (musician), Marijke Pinoy (theatre-maker, actress), Mourade Zeguendi (actor), Sarah Eisa (theatre-maker, actress) and Dahlia Pessemiers-Benamar (theatre-maker, actress). Action Zoo Humain examines in how far theatre can directly affect reality without losing sight of its poetic potential and sense of self-criticism. The company uses the historical concept of the ‘zoo humain’ (human zoo) as an instrument of (re)search to raise questions about ethnic, religious, nationalistic and economic conflict zones. Action Zoo Humain strives to expose power structures, bring inter-cultural issues into the open and activate the public. The company in this respect seeks to use contemporary formats to represent the (complex) cross-cultural social reality. Action Zoo Humain starts from the local, metropolitan super-diversity and encourages and develops international collaborations with both independent artists and organizations.

Cluster 8 — 9

Tom Chadwick is a writer and researcher. He is a PhD student at the University of Leuven and an editor at Hotel magazine. His fiction has been published by Bomb magazine and he was shortlisted for the 2017 White Review short story prize.

Michiel De Cleene is a photographer. The recurring theme in his work is an investigation into the functioning of documentary photography with a focus on the processes of limitation, conditioning and authentication. Following the series Barriers – European Neighbouring (graduation project), KLD, Perifeer Landschap and -SCOPE, he is now working on the long-term project Reference Guide as a researcher at KASK/School of Arts, Gent.

Dorothee Ostmeier is Head of the Department of German and Scandinavian at the University of Oregon, serving also as Faculty of Folklore and Public Culture, Participating Faculty of Comparative Literature, and Women and Gender Studies. Her current research is entitled “Portals – Shape Shifters – Singularity Events in Romanticism to Postmodern Digital Culture.” In researching and teaching fantasy and the uncanny she tackles the borders between reality and fiction, utopia and anti-utopia and the psychological and social risks of crossing such borders. She has published on fantasy texts by a.o. the Grimms, ETA Hoffmann, Michael Ende, Cornelia Funke, Rafik Schami, and Christian Kracht. Her books are entitled Gender, Sex, Liebe in poetischen Dialogen des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts and Sprache des Dramas – Drama der Sprache. Nelly Sachs' dramatische Szenen.

Stephen Rodgers is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His other research, on text-music relations, nineteenth-century song, and musical form, has appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, Music Theory and Analysis, Current Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Journal of Musicological Research, Indiana Theory Review, and Theoria. He is also a tenor, and has performed several lecture-recitals on the songs of nineteenth-century composers.

Chi Wang is a composer and performer who creates music and intermedia art that involves computer-human interaction. Her current research and compositional interests include sound design and data-driven instrumental musical performance. Wang’s compositions have been performed internationally, including presentations at International Computer Music Conferences, the Musicacoustica Festival in Beijing, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States national conferences, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Kyma International Sound Symposiums, etc. Wang is currently a D.M.A. candidate at the University of Oregon teaching Digital Audio and Sound Design.

Jeffrey Stolet is a professor of music and director of the Intermedia Music Technology at the University of Oregon. Stolet’s work has been presented around the world and is available on the Newport Classic, IMG Media, Cambria, SEAMUS and ICMA labels. Presentations of Stolet’s work include major electroacoustic and new media festivals, such as the International Computer Music Conference, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States Conference, the MusicAcoustica Festival in Beijing, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, etc. In addition, Stolet's work has been presented in such diverse venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan, and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University.

Cluster 10

Florentina Holzinger studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam. She consciously plays with a shifting of boundaries between high culture and entertainment in all her works, earning her a reputation as one of the “most provocative new choreographers”. Since 2011, she has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular women's bodies and martial arts fight scenes - pop cultural references and a penchant for trash are not forgotten. Florentina Holzinger won the Prix Jardin d’Europe for her solo Silk at lmPulsTanz in 2012. In addition to collaborations with Riebeek (Kein Applaus für Scheisse, Spirit, Wellness and Schönheitsabend), Holzinger presented the solo Recovery in 2015, which served her as a means to process the trauma of a very serious accident she had during a performance. In her latest work, Apollon Musagète, six naked women conquer George Balanchine's 1928 neo-classical ballet of the same name, which deals with the god of the arts and his three muses. Armed with black humor and elements of the circus freak show and the 1960s live art, the performers aim at the neoliberal body cult and its voyeuristic mechanisms.

Gabriele Kämper (1960, Kapstadt) ist Literaturwissenschaftlerin und studierte Germanistik, Lateinamerikanistik und Philosophie in Berlin und Madrid. Sie promovierte mit einer Arbeit zu Rhetorik und Geschlecht in rechtsintellektuellen Diskursen und publiziert zu Fragen politischer Rhetorik, konservativer Ideengeschichte und literarischen Imaginationen von Männlichkeit. Ihre Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind geschlechtliche Kodierungen kollektiver Gedächtnisorte, politischer Diskurse und poetologischer (Selbst)entwürfe. Gabriele Kämper leitet die Geschäftsstelle Gleichstellung des Landes Berlin. Sie ist Beirätin der Feministischen Studien. Publikationen u.a.: „Stille Post. Reformulierungen radikalisierter Männlichkeit in rechten Diskursen“ (Hechler/Stuwe 2015); „Erzählte Geschichte - Erinnerte Literatur“ Grucza 2012); „Das Schweigen der Musen“ (Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 2010).

Em. Prof.in Dr.in Eva Kreisky war Professorin für politische Theorie an der Universität Wien. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte umfassen u.a. Theorie politischer Institutionen, Politik der Geschlechterverhältnisse, politische Männlichkeit(en) und Männerbundideologien, neoliberale Transformationen.

Mag.a Dr.in Marion Löffler ist Lektorin und Projektmitarbeiterin am Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Universität Wien. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte umfassen u.a. Staats- und Demokratietheorien, politikwissenschaftliche Geschlechter- und Männlichkeitsforschung, fiktionale Literatur in der politischen Ideengeschichte.

Bart Philipsen (°1961) studied German and English as well as Philosophy at KU Leuven and the Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg in Germany. He was appointed professor of German literature in 2002 and lectures also on theatre, theory & performance in the program of Culture Studies and Western Literature. Since 2012 he chairs the department of Literary Studies. His research interests include topics like the ‘afterlife’ of German Romanticism and Idealism in late 19th, 20th and 21st century literature, art and philosophy; modern and contemporary theories and practices of tragedy & Trauerspiel, drama & post-drama; theories of performativity; aesthetics & politics.

Cluster 11 — 12

Pieter Vermeulenteaches American literature at the University of Leuven. He is the author of three books: Romanticism after the Holocaust (2010), Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (2015), and the forthcoming Literature and the Anthropocene.

Elke Van Kerckvoorde (1992) woont en werkt in Gent en wordt vertegenwoordigt door Galerij De Ziener te Asse. Elke Van Kerckvoorde legt in haar beeldend werk de nadruk op het ontlenen, bewerken en combineren van logo’s of grafische beelden van verpakkingen en ander reclamemateriaal. Hierdoor ontwikkelde Van Kerckvoorde een grafische beeldtaal die de grens tussen design, grafisch ontwerp en schilderkunst opzoekt. Van Kerckvoordes werk evolueert vaak van een digitaal geconstrueerd ontwerp of beeld naar een handmatige omzetting op papier, doek, paneel etc. Voor het beeld “Telstar 5.6.6. (blonds have more fun)” liet Van Kerckvoorde zich inspireren door de grafische elementen van een voetbalveld en de officiële WK-bal, alsook de wereldgoal die Dries Mertens maakte tijden de match tegen Panama.

Rolf Parr ist Professor für Germanistik (Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft) an der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Er leitet dort das Masterprogramm „Literatur und Medienpraxis“ und ein Promotionskolleg zum Thema „Mediale Darstellungen von Arbeit“. Seine Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind: Diskurstheorie, Kollektivsymbolik und Normalismusforschung, Literatur-, Kultur- und Mediengeschichte sowie -theorie des 18. bis 21. Jahrhunderts.

Sophie Whetton is a British ex-patriot and recent graduate of the Arts having studied at LUCA - School of Arts, Ghent. Her creative writing explores the boundaries between experience, fiction and humour. Often observational in nature, the texts reference her own self-awareness and insecurities of being an introvert young woman navigating her way through an ever-changing Western society. She explores the visual arts through photography both documentary and expressive in nature.

Cluster 13

Ines Cox (1987) is a graphic designer running her own independent studio in Antwerp. In 2009 she graduated from Luca School of Arts (Ghent) and continued studying for a second Master course at Werkplaats Typografie (The Netherlands). Ines teaches Typography at the Graphic Design department of the Royal Academy in Antwerp and since January 2017 she has also been a researcher there.

Naomi Lubrich (1976), studied art history and literature in New York (Barnard College, Columbia University) and Berlin (Free University of Berlin), where she completed her dissertation on “The Writer’s Plume. Fashion in French Realist Fiction” („Die Feder des Schriftstellers. Mode im Roman des französischen Realismus“, Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2014). She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Jewish Museum Berlin and is currently the director of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland in Basel.

Marylaura Papalas is Associate Professor of French at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and also serves as book review editor for Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature. She specializes in 20th century European avant-garde movements and has published on both Greek and French surrealists. Her latest article on surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is the 2017 recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship in the Field of Foreign Languages. She is currently completing a monograph project on Schiaparelli and the construction of networked identity and femininity in her designs and representations of them in contemporaneous fashion magazines.

Thomas Meinecke wurde 1955 in Hamburg geboren, lebte ab 1977 in München und zog 1994 in ein oberbayrisches Dorf. Von 1978 bis 1986 war er Mitherausgeber und Redakteur der Avantgarde-Zeitschrift Mode & Verzweiflung, in den Achtzigerjahren schrieb er Kolumnen für die ZEIT, ab 1986 veröffentlichte er Erzählungen und zahlreiche Romane, zuletzt den Roman Selbst (2016) im Suhrkamp Verlag. Sein Werk wurde mehrfach ausgezeichnet, u.a. mit dem Düsseldorfer Literaturpreis (2003) und dem Karl-Sczuka-Preis für Hörspiel als Radiokunst (2008). Thomas Meinecke ist außerdem Musiker und Texter in der 1980 von ihm mitgegründeten Band Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (FSK), Radio-DJ in seiner Sendung Zündfunk Nachtmix (BR 2) und hat auch als Solokünstler Platten aufgenommen.

Otto von Busch (1975) is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, holds a PhD in design from the School of Design and Craft at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has taught and exhibited work on the topic of fashion and empowerment over the last fifteen years. In his research he explores how the powers of fashion can be bent to achieve a positive personal and social condition with which the Everyperson is free to grow to their full potential. This entails moving away from seeing fashion as aesthetic decrees and arbitrary authority, towards thinking fashion as a shared biosocial energy. His book chapters have appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (2017), The Routledge Companion to Design Research (2015), as well as The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (2014). He lives and works in New York.

Cluster 14

A sentence of sixty five letters describing the life and works of Elvis Bonier.

Nadia Sels (1981) is lecturer of cultural history at the Faculty of Design Sciences of Antwerp University and lecturer of art history at PXL-MAD, School of Arts in Hasselt, where she is also a member of the research group FRAME. She obtained her PhD at Ghent University, where as a guest professor she teaches Classical Mythology and Greek Literature. She publishes on art, literature and mythology.

Tom Lambeens maakt en spreekt over beelden. Als postdoctoraal onderzoeker is hij verbonden aan onderzoeksgroep FRAME en geeft hij les aan PXL-MAD. In 2013 verdedigde hij zijn doctoraat (UHasselt) waarin het concept ‘beeldende zwaartekracht’ centraal stond. Het ‘omzichtbare’ en het denkbeeldige zijn de onderzoeksthema's die hem momenteel bezighouden.

Cluster 15

Gry Ulstein is a PhD candidate at Ghent University in Belgium, where she is a member of the project “Narrating the Mesh.” NARMESH studies representations of the nonhuman and climate change in Anglophone literature. Gry is particularly interested in contemporary weird literature as an expression of ecological anxieties, and lately her work has centred on questions of agency, uncertainty, hope, and monsters in the age of the Anthropocene.

Sophie Pluim is een illustratrice uit Utrecht die in haar gedetailleerde werk chaos en orde combineert tot een geheel. Ze werkt met traditionele tekentechnieken en moderne media. Voor meer werk, zie Instagram

Kahn Faassen is a PhD candidate working on weird fiction at the University of Leuven. His project focuses primarily on encounters with the sublime in the oeuvre of Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, and Algernon Blackwood, and on how these works engage with changing epistemic paradigms in late 19th-early 20th century Britain leading up to the First World War.

Felix Bosschaert studeerde in 2018 als Illustrator af aan LUCA School of Arts (Campus Beeldende Kunsten Gent). Zijn werk wordt gekenmerkt door macabere (des)illusie en een pikzwarte atmosfeer. Persoonlijke verhalen, archetypische narratieven, duistere rituelen en historische gebeurtenissen verweven zich tot één huiveringwekkend geheel.

Cluster 16

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Currently, his work explores narrative strategies for figuring humanity's entanglement in a more-than-human world. He is the author of three books, including most recently Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers' Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

Kaisa Kortekallio is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She is a member of the research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (Academy of Finland, iNARR 2018–2022). The Helsinki branch of the consortium studies how contemporary speculative fiction draws and stretches the limits of human cognition, agency, and narrative. Kortekallio’s current work considers science-fictional articulations of more-than-human experience and readerly engagement as ecological action.

Flor Maesen studied photography at KASK/School of Arts Ghent. He is a visual artist dedicated to describing the absurd and the myriad experiences that the earth has to offer. He considers himself both a distant satellite and a premonitary messenger.

Alison Sperling is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin (ICI Berlin), where she is currently working on her first manuscript, Weird Modernisms. Her interests include 20th and 21st century American literature and science fiction, queer and feminist theory, and the Anthropocene.

Cluster 19

François Levrau is Doctor in de Sociale Wetenschappen en verbonden aan het Centrum Pieter Gillis van de Universiteit Antwerpen. In zijn onderzoek focust hij zich met name op politiek-filosofische kwesties (meestal in relatie tot de multiculturele samenleving).

Milo Rau is a Swiss born director and author, best known for founding the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) in 2007. In 2018, he became the artistic director of the Belgian theatre NTGent. Hailed as one of the most influential directors of our time, Rau has studied sociology, Germanic and Romanic languages, and literature in Paris, Berlin, and Zürich. He was granted the European Theatre Prize in 2018 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Theatre Department of Lund University in 2019.

Daniel Castro Garcia is a UK based photographer/filmmaker. Concerned by the images coming from the Mediterranean Sea, he started the Foreigner project in May 2015, with the aim of contributing a more human and collaborative response to the visual landscape defining this European humanitarian crisis. Over the course of 12 months he travelled to, and revisited, most of Europe’s refugee/migrant hotspots. In 2016, his book Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016 was shortlisted for the Mack Books First Book Award and the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award 2016. In 2017, he was the winner of the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award. His publication Foreigner: Collected Writings 2017 received a shortlist nomination for the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Prize 2018. The Foreigner project has been exhibited internationally at the MOCP Chicago, USA; Cortona On The Move, Italy; Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, USA; Organ Vida Festival, Croatia; and New York University, USA. In 2017, Daniel was a grantee of the Magnum Foundation Fund and the recipient of the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in Humanistic Photography. This support enabled Daniel and creative partner, Jade Morris, to relocate permanently to Sicily and work full-time at the “Zingale-Aquino Reception Centre for Unaccompanied Minors”, a home to 12 sub-Saharan boys rescued in the Mediterranean Sea.

Maha El Hissy studierte Germanistik, Arabistik und Hispanistik in Kairo, Bayreuth und München, wo sie mit einer Arbeit zum Thema "Getürkte Türken. Karnevaleske Stilmittel im Theater, Kabarett und Film deutsch-türkischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler" promoviert wurde. El Hissy war wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in der DFG-Forschergruppe "Anfänge (in) der Moderne" an der LMU in München, wo sie seit Oktober 2012 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für deutsche Philologie ist. Seit Februar 2017 ist sie als visiting research scholar an der University of California, Berkeley. Zurzeit forscht El Hissy zum Verhältnis theatraler, religiöser und politischer Imagination.

Cluster 20

Janine Hauthal is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO, 2014-2021) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research focusses on intermediality studies, transmedial narratology, contemporary literatures in English (Anglophone ‘fictions of Europe’, British drama since the 1990s), genre theory and metareference, postdramatic (multilingual) theatre and postcolonial literatures. Her work has been published in Modern Drama, Journal for Postcolonial Writing, and English Text Construction as well as with Brill, De Gruyter, and Routledge. Her current research project explores ‘Europe in the Anglophone Settler Imagination since 1989’.

David Clarke was born in Lincolnshire. His first pamphlet, Gaud, won the Michael Marks award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015 and was longlisted for the Polari Prize. Another pamphlet, Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and was named a Poetry School ‘Book the Year.’ His poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine and The Interpreter’s House.

Heather Agyepong is a visual artist, performer/actor and maker who lives and works in London. Her practice is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, activism, visibility, the diaspora and the archive. She has been commissioned by a number of organisations including the Mayor of London, Photoworks, Artichoke, and Tate Exchange. She was also nominated for the 2018 Sky Arts South Bank Breakthrough Award and her work resides in a number of collections including Autograph ABP and New Orleans Museum of Art.

Cluster 21

Thomas Decreus is historicus en doctor in de filosofie. Momenteel werkt hij als journalist voor DeWereldMorgen.be. Hij publiceerde Een paradijs waait uit de storm. Over mark, democratie en verzet (2013) en Dit is morgen (2016). Binnenkort verschijnt van zijn hand het boek Spektakeldemocratie (2019).

Louise Hoon is a PhD Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Department of Political Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her PhD focuses on the effects of Eurosceptic voting and EU-issue voting on policy congruence between political parties and voters. Broader research interests are EU democracy, voting behavior and public opinion, European elections and the European Parliament.

Astrid Van Weyenberg is Assistant Professor in Cultural Analysis at Leiden University. She is the author of The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy (Brill, 2013). She is also co-editor of the volume Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present (Brill, 2016) and of a special issue Narrating “Europe”: A Contested Imagined Community (Politique Européenne, Forthcoming). Van Weyenberg 's current work is on narratives of Europe in cultural projects and art.

Thomas Lehr (1957) ist ein deutscher Schriftsteller. Von ihm erschienen u.a. die Bücher September. Fata Morgana (2010), Größenwahn passt in die kleinste Hütte: Kurze Prozesse (2012), 42 (2013), Zweiwasser (2014), Nabokovs Katze (2016), Schlafende Sonne (2017) und Frühling. Novelle (2019). Sein Werk wurde mehrfach ausgezeichnet, u. a. 2012 mit dem Marie-Luise Kaschnitz-Preis, 2015 mit dem Joseph Breitbach-Preis und 2018 mit dem Bremer Literaturpreis, dem Spycher-Literaturpreis sowie dem Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis.

Cluster 22

Pieter Troch studied East European languages and cultures at Ghent University, where he obtained a PhD on Yugoslav nation-building in education during the interwar period. He worked for several non-governmental organisations in Kosovo and Serbia in the fields of minority protection and transitional justice, before returning to academic research. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg (Germany) and lecturer at the University of Regensburg. His ongoing research focusses on urban transformation in mixed Slavic-Albanian cities of Socialist Yugoslavia.

Jaume Castan Pinos works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark. He holds a Ph.D. in International Politics (Queen’s University Belfast, 2011). He is the Director of the European Studies Bachelor programme at the University of Southern Denmark. His academic interests are framed by ethno-territorial conflicts, sovereignty and political violence. He has conducted extensive research in/on Catalonia, North Africa and former Yugoslavia. He is the author of Kosovo and the Collateral Effects of Humanitarian Intervention (Routledge, 2019).

Igor Drljača is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. He completed his Master’s in Film Production at York University in 2011, where he was also an adjunct professor between 2015-18. He is the recipient of the Ontario Art Council’s K.M. Hunter artist award for media arts in 2014. His work has been supported by Telefilm Canada, Eurimages, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and the Harold Greenberg Fund. His award-winning short films include Woman in Purple (2010), and The Fuse: or How I Burned Simon Bolivar (2011), which have screened at hundreds of festivals, including: South by Southwest, Toronto, Telluride, Tampere, Palm Springs Shortfest, and Vancouver International Film Festival. In 2013, The Fuse was nominated as best short documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards (CSA). His critically acclaimed debut feature Krivina (2012) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and had its international premiere at Rotterdam. He co-produced Albert Shin’s In Her Place (2014), which received 7 CSA nominations, including best picture. His sophomore feature The Waiting Room (2015) premiered at Locarno International Film Festival, and had its North American premiere at TIFF. It was nominated for 2 CSAs in 2016. His first feature documentary, The Stone Speakers (2018) had its world premiere at TIFF and international premiere at Berlinale 2019 in the Forum section. He splits his time between Vancouver and Toronto, where he runs the production company TimeLapse Pictures with director Albert Shin.

Kris Van Heuckelom is van opleiding slavist en is als docent Culturele Studies en Poolse Studies verbonden aan de Faculteit Letteren van de KU Leuven. Hij is gespecialiseerd in laatmoderne Poolse literatuur en cultuur (met bijzondere aandacht voor comparatieve en transnationale perspectieven) en heeft een tiental boeken, verzamelbundels en anthologieën in dit domein gepubliceerd. Zijn meest recente boek is Polish Migrants in European Film 1918-2017 (New York – Londen: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Cluster 23

Anke Bosma graduated from the research masters Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her area of interest is (de)colonial theory and history in the Netherlands, which she partly developed while doing research at the Research Centre for Material Culture in Leiden. As a PhD candidate in the ERC-funded Rural Imaginations project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), she explores how the rural and its relation to globalization are imagined in Dutch culture, specifically literature, film and television.

Emily Ng is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. As a member of the ERC-funded Rural Imaginations project, her work explores renderings of rurality in China across film and other mediums. Her previous ethnographic research on the role of Maoism in contemporary Chinese cosmologies is forthcoming as A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (University of California Press, 2020).

Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She directs the ERC-funded Rural Imaginations project. Recent publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and the edited volume Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (Palgrave, 2019, with Simon Ferdinand and Irene Villaescusa-Illán).

Hanneke Stuit is Assistant Professor at the Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the University of Amsterdam. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded Rural Imaginations project, zooming in on South Africa. Recent publications include Ubuntu Strategies: Constructing Spaces of Belonging in Contemporary South African Culture (Palgrave, 2016), and Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Spaces, Mobilities, Aesthetics (Brill, 2016, with Esther Peeren and Astrid van Weyenberg).

Tjalling Valdés Olmos is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). He is part of the ERC-funded Rural Imaginations project, where his subproject focuses on normative and subversive imaginations of the US rural in contemporary film, television series, and literature through the context of globalization. His theoretical and methodological framework revolves around feminist, queer, critical race, and decolonial studies.

Cluster 25

Nic Balthazar studeerde literatuur en theaterwetenschap. Hij schrijft, maakt televisie, documentaires, theater en (meermaals bekroonde) fictiefilms (o.a. Ben X, Tot Altijd, Everybody Happy). Als ‘cinema-activist’ draaide hij een aantal documentaires en clips om te sensibiliseren rond milieu en klimaatverandering. Zijn actie SING FOR THE CLIMATE vond een half miljoen deelnemers in 42 landen. Hij is een van de initiatiefnemers van de KLIMAATZAAK.

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He is 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). He has also (co-)edited special issues of American Imago, Studies in the Novel, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts on ecological grief, climate change fiction, postcolonial trauma novels, and transcultural Holocaust memory.

Alexander Devriendt is de artistiek leider en een van de oprichters van de theaterperformancegroep Ontroerend Goed. Hij regisseerde onder meer de theatertrilogie The Smile Off Your Face, Intern en A Game of You en gevierde producties als A History of Everything, Pubers Bestaan Niet en Audience. Zijn laatste producties waren £¥€$ en Are we not drawn onward to new erA. Zijn producties wonnen verscheidene awards, en worden gespeeld over de hele wereld, met recente bezoeken aan Shanghai, Sydney en Canada.

Moya De Feyter schrijft proza, poëzie en theaterteksten. Ze studeerde af als theaterwetenschapper en zoekt naar manieren om haar teksten ook via het podium bij een publiek te krijgen. In 2018 verscheen haar debuut Tot iemand eindelijk bij Uitgeverij Vrijdag. De bundel werd genomineerd voor de Poëziedebuutprijs aan Zee en kreeg een eervolle vermelding van de jury van de C. Buddingh-prijs. In 2019 kwam Massastrandingen uit, een meerstemmige, caleidoscopische bundel over zeezoogdieren, stormen, sinaasappelbomen en het klimaat. Ze is ook de oprichter van Klimaatdichters, het kraakverse Nederlandstalige luik van Poets for the Planet. (www.moyadefeyter.be)

Mahlu Mertens is a doctoral candidate at Ghent University, where she explores how climate change literature that resists the typical form of the post-apocalyptic climate dystopia may provide alternative ways of narrating anthropogenic climate change that are more apt to represent this multi-faceted and far-reaching phenomenon. In 2019 she also published her first poetry collection Ik tape je een bed and together with Hanne Vandersteene she is the artistic director of grensgeval, an interdisciplinary theatre company that, until the pandemic hit, was touring internationally with the performances Plock! and murmur.

Christel Stalpaert is Professor of Performing and Media Art Studies at the Art Studies Department of Ghent University (Belgium). She is director of the research centres S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts and Media) and PEPPER (Philosophy, Ethology, Politics and PERformance). She has co-edited publications on Jan Lauwers’ Theatre Work with Needcompany (Academia Press, 2007) and on Alain Platel’s Choreographic Work with Les ballets c de la b (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Cluster 26

Véronique Bragard is associate professor of comparative literature at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, where she teaches contemporary literatures in English and a research seminar on comics and the postcolonial. Her current projects focus on the Belgian colonial past as well as Belgo-Congolese literatures, artistic expressions, and decolonialization praxis. Her recent publications include the analysis of Sammy Baloji’s photographic work (Social Dynamics), adaptations of Heart of Darkness (European Comic Art, Postcolonial Comics), and Belgo-Congolese comics and literatures (Literature Compass, Outre-mers: revue d’histoire, Essays in French Literature and Culture).

Michaël Matthys is a Charleroi-born visual artist and lecturer who has been exhibiting his work internationally for over two decades. His publications include Garde à vue (1999), Frigobox (Fréon, 1999), Comix 2000 (L’Association, 1999), Self Service (Fréon/La casa Fernando Pessoa, 2001), Moloch (FRMK, 2003), Je suis un ange aussi... (FRMK, 2009), La ville rouge (FRMK, 2009), and a forthcoming graphic novel inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and colonial archives (with FRMK). In a 2012 exhibition, Matthys presented an installation of 1000 aquatints disclosing the steelwork industries of Charleroi’s gloomy industrial past. In 2014, he participated in the Putain de guerre exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi, in which he engaged with the bodies of the soldiers decomposing in the darkness. His large-scale drawings often mix blood and soil, grotesque and sordid elements, to approach the spectres of Belgium’s past.

Laura Michiels works as an English lecturer at Erasmus Brussels University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She obtained a PhD degree in Literary Studies from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2015. Her current research focuses on contemporary American political theatre (topics: geopolitical issues, labour relations). She is the author of The Metatheater of Tennessee Williams: Tracing the Artistic Process through Seven Plays (McFarland, 2021).

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford. She is the author of two monographs, Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007) and What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford, 2014), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2015. Mukherjee has co-edited A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (2014) and edited After Lacan (2018). She has published articles in three key areas of research and teaching specialism: Victorian literature and culture, postcolonial studies, and intellectual history, in particular the history and theory of psychoanalysis. These have appeared in PMLA, MLQ, Contemporary Literature, Textual Practice, Paragraph, and other peer-reviewed journals. Mukherjee was John Hinkley Visiting Professor at the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University in 2019. Her current work, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Cluster 29

Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015. Her articles have appeared in positions: asia critiques, the Journal of Visual Culture, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and she has written for Omagiu, Third Text Asia, and Artforum. She is currently associate professor of Rhetoric and History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Rika Dunlap is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Guam. Her areas of research are Asian philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics. Her recent publications include: “A Buddhist Conception of Hope” in The Moral Psychology of Hope; “Hope without the Future: Zen Buddhist Hope in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō” in the Journal of Japanese Philosophy; and “From Freedom to Equality: Rancière and the Aesthetic Experience of Equality,” in Continental Philosophy Review.

Tim Christiaens is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He works on political philosophy and critical theory, and has published in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Cultural Critique, and the European Journal of Social Theory.

Stéphane Symons is Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His most recent book is The Work of Forgetting, or How Can We Make the Future Possible? ​​(Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019).

Cluster 30

Lorelinde Verhees (Den Bosch 1983) is beeldend kunstenaar en schrijft over kunst en kunstenaars. Hoe worden we wie we zijn? Verhees is geïnteresseerd in de manier en de verschillende fases waarop de betekenis van het subject telkens opnieuw tot stand komt. Het afbeelden, of de afbeelding speelt hierin een belangrijke rol als reflexief instrument. Gebruikmakend van assemblage en montage legt ze verbanden tussen ongelijksoortige zaken en maakt deze zichtbaar. Deze aanpak krijgt vaak een fysieke vorm in een installatie. Haar werk was onder andere te zien bij Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, P/////AKT, Amsterdam, HDTS Joshua Tree, Alpineum Produzentengalerie, Luzern en Enough Room for Space in Brussel. Haar teksten zijn gepubliceerd in Metropolis M, Gonzo (Circus) en Tubelight Magazine. In 2020 was ze met Aukje van Rooden gedurende vier maanden artist in residence bij Gastatelier LEOXIII.

Herman Siemens teaches Modern Philosophy at the University of Leiden.

Katia Hay is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

Aukje van Rooden is filosoof en literatuurwetenschapper en als universitair docent Filosofie van Kunst en Cultuur verbonden aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Ze is tevens vertaler en redacteur. In haar werk richt ze zich op het snijvlak van filosofie, kunst en samenleving. Haar Literatuur, autonomie en engagement verscheen in 2019 in Engelse vertaling bij Bloomsbury.

Erik Hagoort invites others to explore with him other than usual ways of thinking, speaking, writing, and interacting together. Modulating experiences of thinking together is at the core of his practice. His work contains improvisations, conversations, writing, curating, teaching, and coaching artistic research. Hagoort received a PhD in Arts in 2017 from Antwerp University & Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts on his artistic research 'Resuming Encounters'. Since 2006 he is tutor artistic research at the Master Programme of St. Joost School of Art & Design in 's Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. Hagoort is the author of Good Intentions. Judging the Art of Encounter (Mondriaan Foundation, 2005), I don't know what you are going to say (Jap Sam Books, 2018), and On encountering and improvising (Erik Hagoort, 2020).

Jean-Luc Nancy is emeritus professor at the Universtité de Strasbourg and one of the leading philosophers of our time.

Cluster 31

Thomas McDonald is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he researches modern German-language, South Slavic, and Japanese literature and film. His doctoral dissertation examines the concepts of body and place in the work of Peter Handke and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō.

Helen Finch’s research focusses on the literature of the Shoah in German, queer identities in German culture, and diversifying pedagogy. She is Associate Professor of German at the University of Leeds, where she currently directs the Centre for Pedagogic Research in the Arts. Her monograph ‘Sebald’s Bachelors. Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life’appeared in 2013.

Clemens Ruthner, born in Vienna, has lived and taught in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Canada, the US, and Bosnia-Hercegovina. Since 2008 he has been a Professor in German and Central European Studies at Trinity College Dublin and the Director of Research of its School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. His research focuses on Austrian and Central European literatures and cultures, Otherness, Postcolonial Studies and cultural theory. Latest monograph: Habsburg's 'Dark Continent' (2018).

Cluster 32

Thomas Ernst lehrt als Professor für Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft und Digitale Kulturen an der Universiteit Antwerpen. Daneben hält er eine Venia legendi für Germanistische Medienkulturwissenschaft an der Universität Duisburg-Essen. In seiner Forschung befasst er sich mit der mehrsprachigen und der experimentellen Literatur sowie mit der Literatur in der digitalen Gesellschaft. Er hat Bücher zu “Literatur und Subversion” sowie zur Begründung der Netzliteraturwissenschaft vorgelegt. Mehr Informationen: Weblog; Universiteit Antwerpen.

Irina Gradinari ist Literatur- und Filmwissenschaftlerin und ist als Juniorprofessorin für literatur- und medienwissenschaftliche Genderforschung an der FernUniversität in Hagen tätig. Zu ihren aktuellen Forschungsinteressen gehören Filme als Erinnerungsmedien, Frauenfilm, das Verhältnis von Genre und Gender sowie filmische Blicktheorien. Mehr auf die Webseite: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/literatur/genderforschung/team/irina.gradinari.shtml.

Johannes Pause ist Literatur- und Filmwissenschaftler und arbeitet als Research Scientist im Dekanat der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften, Erziehungswissenschaften und Sozialwissenschaften der Universität Luxemburg. Zugleich ist er Mitglied des Instituts für Germanistik und stellvertretender Studiengangsleiter des Bachelor in Animation. Zu seinen aktuellen Forschungsinteressen gehören das politische Kino, Medien des Populismus sowie die Film- und Kulturgeschichte der Isolation.

Lieven Raymaekers is a doctoral researcher at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His research focuses on cultural representations of the submarine in postwar German and Anglo-American literature, film, and videogames.

Michiel Rys is a postdoctoral researcher of the FWO Flanders at the University of Leuven (Belgium). While his doctoral project unearthed figurations of Maximilien Robespierre in German literature, his current research project focuses on literary representations of precarity, activist literature and the memory culture of the German labor movement (1848-1914).

Cleo Reniers is a master student in illustration design, at PXL-MAD School of Arts (Hasselt). Reniers' work consists of organically evolving shapes which attempt to grasp and construct internal, emotional processes.

Cluster 33

Danyil Zadorozhnyi (1995, Lviv) is a Ukrainian poet and journalist who writes in Ukrainian and Russian. He graduated from the University of Lviv (Faculty of Journalism) and has lived in Simferopol, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Zelenograd, and Minsk. His poems have been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Litcentr, Tsirk "Olimp"+TV, polutona, and Gryoza, among other forums. In 2019, Zadorozhnyi obtained the A. Dragomoshchenko Poetry Award (2019). In 2016-2017, he was a finalist of the Smoloskyp Poetry Award (2016-2017), and in 2018, he was longlisted for the Gaivoronnya Award. He’s the author of the bilingual poetry book Nebezpechni Formy Blyz'kosti ("Dangerous Forms of Intimacy", Dnipro: Gerda Press, 2021). Danyil's poetry is translated by Yuliya Charnyshova (1998, Minsk). She is a poet who is also engaged in literary projects as a translator and an editor. She is currently is based in Lviv, Ukraine. At the moment, she is a (remote) graduate student in the Russian Literature in Cross-Cultural Perspective program at the HSE University, St. Petersburg, where she's researching twentieth- and twenty-first-century Slavonic and Anglophone poetry. Her translations appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Words Without Borders (both co-translations — with Elina Alter and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler), as well as in F-Pismo journal. In 2021, she edited Zadorozhnyi’s book Nebezpechni Formy Blyz'kost.

Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert (1989, Moscow) is a multimedia artist, photographer and curator. She graduated from Law Academy in Moscow in 2011. Since 2013 she lives and works in Belgium. She studied Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. Her works have been shown in a.o. Amsterdam (NL), Antwerp (BE), Brussels (BE), Ghent (BE), Hyderabad (IN), Moscow (RU), Murcia (ES), and Rotterdam (NL). She is interested in the interaction between aesthetic experiences and the banality of everyday life, which emerges all the more when presenting art in unexpected environments or, vice versa, when conducting an “ordinary” activity in an art-related context.

Daniil Galkin (1985, Dnipropetrovsk) is a contemporary Ukrainian artist and curator. He studied at the Dnipropetrovsk Theater and Art College and the Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. He works with public space, using spatial installations, happenings, subject-oriented art, etc. He collaborates with state and municipal art institutions, drawing attention to objects of Soviet heritage. He founded the independent NGO Pridneprovskiy barvinok (2018) and the exhibition space "Barvinok Art Residence” (2020). He is the winner of the Grand Prix MUXI in 2011, the Third Special PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2013, the Special Art Future Prize in 2020; he was shortlisted for the PinchukArtCentre Prizes in 2011, 2013 and 2015, and for the Kuryokhin Prize and the Kandinsky Prize in 2012. He was a finalist of the Malevich Award in 2014 and the M17 Sculpture Prize in 2020. His work was on display in solo and group exhibits at international venues, such as Gangwon International Biennale 2018 (Gangneung, South Korea), Silent Barn Gallery (New York), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Saatchi Gallery (London), Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Royal Danish Academy of Art (Copenhagen), Artspace TLV (Tel Aviv), Open Studios (Beirut), Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum (Bratislava), CzechCentre (Prague), National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kiev). He was also a resident of Künstlerhaus Lauenburg/Elbe (Lauenburg), Gaude Polonia (Byalistok, Warsaw), Bogliasco Foundation (Genoa), 40mcube (Rennes), BeirutArtResidence (Beirut), and Forum Regionum (Dnipro).

Masha Ivasenko (1984, Moscow) graduated from the University of Ivanovo with a degree in Philology, and obtained her master’s degree in Arts and Humanities at St. Petersburg University. She has been working primarily as a teacher. Since September 2021, she's been living in Hasselt, Belgium. Her research interests are cinema, contemporary art, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Cluster 35

Roel Griffioen is a writer and researcher. He teaches at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, and is currently finishing a PhD dissertation (FWO/Ghent University) on architecture periodicals and public sphere theory. His writings on housing politics, gentrification and architecture have appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers.

Sjoerd Leijten is a transdisciplinary artist, composer and radio maker with a keen interest in dissident sounds and politics. His practice involves electromagnetism, field recordings, experimental journalism and hacking. Recent works have been shown at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, NL), Budapest Spring Festival (Budapest, HU), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL), FiraTarrega (Tarrega, ES) and Oerol (Terschelling, NL).

Justin Bennett (UK, 1964, based in The Hague) works with sound and image. Trained in sculpture and electronic music, he uses drawing, video, sculpture, and a diverse array of sound forms in his research. One recurrent theme is our experience of archticture, urban development, and the (un)built space. He employs sound in order to render it audible as well as palpable: in his work, listening carefully provides a radically different way of seeing and experiencing.

Davide Tidoni is an artist working from the boundaries of physical, perceptual, and affective dimensions of sound. His work addresses questions regarding interactions with acoustic space, intersubjectivity, and impermanence. His practice also includes interests in the use of sound in counter-cultures and social contexts of struggle. In 2018 he published The Sound of Normalisation, a field research on the ultras group Brescia 1911.

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet in the contemporary crises of climate and public health, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is engaged in the transversal and transdisciplinary potential of the sonic - to listen across disciplines and processes in order to develop a hybridisation of research where arts and humanities skills and methodologies can generate a contemporary response to climate, health and social emergencies.

Cluster 37

Charlotte Vanhoubroeck is a jewellery artist and art historian who brings gradually fading heritage back to life in the contemporary art scene. After graduating at Ghent University, she was trained at d’Academie Sint-Niklaas (BE), Bishopsland Educational Trust (UK) and PXL-MAD School of Arts (BE). She is currently conducting a PhD in the Arts at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts, where she’s investigating and reactivating the lost sentimental jewellery of the first Belgian queen Louise-Marie d’Orléans. Her ‘Stilled Sentiments’ collection has made Charlotte VOCATIO Laureate 2020, was awarded a commendation for the BVK-Preis 2021 für Junges Kunsthandwerk 2021 and has won the Preziosa Prize 2021, the LAO Prize 2022 and the Inhorgenta Special Prize 2022.

Hanneke Grootenboer is Professor of Art History at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Prior, she was Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, where she served as the Head of the Ruskin School of Art. Her scholarship focuses on intersections of early modern art, literature and (contemporary) philosophy from a transhistorical perspective, and addresses topics such as intimacy, interiority, silence, affect and miniaturization. Her recent publications include the co-authored Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton UP, 2021, paperback 2023) and The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago UP, 2021, paperback 2023). She is currently working on a book on art, needlework and thought.

Amelia Toelke is a visual artist whose work is rooted in the history of adornment, decoration, and material culture. Toelke holds a BFA in Metal and Jewelry from SUNY New Paltz and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An interest in public art, collaboration, contemporary craft, and cultural exchange guides her multidisciplinary practice, taking hold early on when she and a group of friends turned an old firehouse in Kingston, NY into a shared studio and gallery. She is the recipient of merits such as the Windgate Fellowship Award, the Blair H. and Leah D. Temkin Award, the Best in Show prize for Sculpt EVV, and the Ora B. Schneider fellowship at the Women’s Studio Workshop. She has been an artist in residence at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, the Women’s Studio Workshop, Lanzhou City University, China, Brush Creek Center for the Arts, and a participant in Artisterium in Tblisi, Georgia. Her work has been presented in publications such as Metalsmith magazine, Art Jewelry Forum, and The Washington Post and has been published in the books 500 Enameled Objects, Unique by Design. Toelke has taught at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Peters Valley, and SUNY New Paltz. Toelke exhibits nationally and internationally and is currently based in Chatham, NY.

Anke Gilleir is professor of German literature and gender studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium). In her research she addresses women writers, literature and identity, aesthetics and politics.

Cluster 38

Marius Kwint is Reader in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth, UK. A graduate of the innovative Cultural History programme at the University of Aberdeen in 1988, he obtained his doctorate in History in 1995 from the University of Oxford, on the origins of the circus in late eighteenth-century England. Subsequent posts have included research fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and with the joint V&A Museum/Royal College of Art History of Design Programme in London, where he devised and organized the conference Material Memories: Design and Evocation in 1998 (the book published in 1999). He then served as Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2008 and was elected to a fellowship at St. Catherine's College in 2004. Activities since joining Portsmouth in 2008 include curating the exhibition Brains: the Mind as Matter at Wellcome Collection in London in 2012 and at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester 2013-14 and co-curating the official Venice Biennale collateral exhibition, Frontiers Reimagined: Art That Connects Us, with Sundaram Tagore in 2015. Dr Kwint has published many catalogue and artist monograph essays in transcultural art and art-science interactions. In 2019 he was awarded a mid-career fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, investigating art's relationship with neuroscience in the UK.

Ine Meganck (°1988) is grafisch ontwerper en docent gevestigd in Gent. Ze is vooral actief in het culturele veld met een sterke focus op boekontwerp, hedendaagse kunst en architectuur. Sinds 2019 doceert ze typografie aan de Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten te Antwerpen en sinds 2022 ook aan het KASK, School Of Arts te Gent. Zelf studeerde ze af in 2012 aan de Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem (NL).

Liesbeth den Besten (Amsterdam) is an art historian who works as an independent writer, lecturer, and curator since the mid 1980s in the field of crafts and design, and is specialized in contemporary jewellery. Together with Gijs Bakker, Ruudt Peters, and Ted Noten she is one of the initiators of MASieraad Hasselt-Amsterdam, an international MA in jewellery, affiliated with PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt (since 2021). She is on the advisory board of the Journal of Jewellery Research. She has been contributing to many books, catalogues, and journals, besides publishing her own books such as On Jewellery: A Compendium of International Contemporary Art Jewellery (2011).

Charlotte Vanhoubroeck is a jewellery artist and art historian who brings gradually fading heritage back to life in the contemporary art scene. After graduating at Ghent University, she was trained at d’Academie Sint-Niklaas (BE), Bishopsland Educational Trust (UK) and PXL-MAD School of Arts (BE). She is currently conducting a PhD in the Arts at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts, where she’s investigating and reactivating the lost sentimental jewellery of the first Belgian queen Louise-Marie d’Orléans. Her ‘Stilled Sentiments’ collection has made Charlotte VOCATIO Laureate 2020, was awarded a commendation for the BVK-Preis 2021 für Junges Kunsthandwerk 2021 and has won the Preziosa Prize 2021, the LAO Prize 2022 and the Inhorgenta Special Prize 2022.

Cluster 39

Oriana Virone specializes in contemporary South Korean Cinema. After graduating from SOAS with a MA in Global Cinemas and the Transcultural, she has been working within the cultural field, including for the Korean Film Festival Belgium. She is currently researching female solidarity in contemporary South Korean women's cinema.

Élise Deschambre holds a PhD in theatre studies from UCLouvain (Belgium). Her research, including her doctoral thesis (2022, funded by the F.R.S.-FNRS), explores the connections between contemporary playwriting and performance, encompassing both dramaturgy and the creative process. She has published several articles in journals of theatre, literature and humanities (such as Critical Stages, Études théâtrales, Revue des Sciences Humaines). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Textyles. She also was assistant director for Philippe Sireuil (as a trainee) in 2018 and for Valentine Gérard and Francine Landrain in 2021.

Durant sa formation en mise en scène et dramaturgie à l’INSAS (Bruxelles), Dominique Mesa a développé un intérêt particulier pour les formes de représentations scéniques ne s'appuyant pas de manière exclusive sur le texte dramatique. C’est dans cette perspective qu’elle a clôturé son cursus comme auditrice libre au Tanztheater de Wuppertal où elle a pu assister aux répétitions de différentes reprises de pièces chorégraphiques de Pina Bausch ainsi qu'au processus de création de Nur Du. Son intérêt pour la pluridisciplinarité scénique l’a par la suite amenée à travailler comme assistante mise en scène ou à la dramaturgie de différents projets chorégraphiques ou opératiques dont Blaubart d’Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Egalement détentrice d’un Master en Arts du Spectacle, elle poursuit ses recherches sur les formes scéniques pluridisciplinaires dans le cadre du doctorat qu’elle mène actuellement à l’ULB et portant sur le processus génétique dans l’opéra contemporain.

Karel Vanhaesebrouck is a professor of theatre and performance studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He also teaches cultural history and theatre history at RITCS (Brussels) and ESACT (Liège). He has published a wide-range of articles and books within the fields of theatre history and theory, dramaturgy, cultural policy, cultural studies. His research interests range from early modern theatre history to contemporary theatre and circus. He recently co-authored "Marketing violence. The affective econmy of violent imagneries in the Dutch Republic with Cambridge University Press". Vanhaesebrouck is also the initiator of Game*Play, a monthly workshop on video game culture.