Dr. Zoë Ghyselinck

Zoë Ghyselinck is a Postdoctoral Researcher (2020-2024; BOF, Ghent University), Coordinator of the Consortium for Health Humanities, Arts, Reading and Medicine (CHARM), and former Senior Humboldt Fellow (2022-2023; University of Regensburg, Germany). In her research, she explores modern and contemporary representations of communicating with the dead, mediation and the development of communication technology. She is preparing a project on anticipatory mourning and the posthumous impact of end-of-life narratives, conceived in palliative care by terminally ill parents and grandparents.

Zoë is a classical scholar and interested in the various receptions of ancient literatures and cultures in modern and contemporary cultural contexts. She obtained her PhD in the Department of Literary Studies (2013, Ghent University) on the reception of Greek tragedy and the philosophical concept of the tragic in early-twentieth-century German neoclassical literature. Her first monograph, Form und Formauflösung der Tragödie: Die Poetik des Tragischen und der Tragödie als religiöses Erneuerungsmuster in den Schriften Paul Ernsts (1866–1933) was published with De Gruyter in 2015. In this book, she explored the religious underpinnings of an artistic and societal revolution of form in German neoclassical writings. 

She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the classical and cultural studies departments of the Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands), was awarded the 'Udo-Kellergrant for Religion and Modernity' (2014, "Vom Dichter zum Reformator" – Zu einer Neubestimmung der Form im deutschsprachigen expressionistischen Drama) to do research in the German Literature Archives in Marbach, and was a Junior Postdoctoral Researcher of the Flanders Research Foundation (2016-2020) at Ghent University. She has co-edited the interdisciplinary volume Necrodialogues and Media: Communicating with the Dead in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries in the series Media and Cultural Memory (with Dr. Elena Fabietti. De Gruyter, in press). Her second book (Routledge, in preparation), Communicating with the Dead in Contemporary Western Literature: Spiritual Mediums and Technical Media, discusses how the literary imagination explores the intersections of media development with religious practices of communicating with the dead. 
In 2022, she was elected as a new member of the Young Academy, Belgium.