Gert Buelens is a professor of English and American literature at Ghent University. His degrees are from the Universities of Ghent (Lic. English and German, 1984; Teacher training, 1985) and Sussex (DPhil in American Studies, 1990). He has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, 1996-7; the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC), 2009; and the School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2014-15. Buelens has edited or co-edited Deferring a Dream: Sub-Versions of the American Columbiad (Birkhäuser, 1994), Enacting History in Henry James (Cambridge UP, 1997), The Catastrophic Imperative: Subjectivity, Time and Memory in Contemporary Thought (Palgrave, 2009), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2013), and the Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). Monographs include Henry James and the "Aliens": In Possession of the American Scene (Rodopi, 2002; American Studies Network Book Prize) and editions of Confidence and Washington Square (with Susan Griffin) in the Cambridge Complete Fiction of Henry James (forthcoming). Buelens is the author of some sixty essays in collections and journals, the latter including American Studies in Scandinavia, Modern Philology, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Diacritics, Studies in the Novel, Textual Practice, Criticism and PMLA. He is the Book Review Editor for the Henry James Review and is Editor-in-Chief of the open-access journal Authorship, and serves on several editorial boards, including Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Canadian Review of American Studies, Comparative American Studies, E-REA: Revue d’études anglophones, Henry James E-Journal, Journal of American Studies of Turkey, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Open Humanities Press, and the book series Passages – Transitions – Intersections (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). He is a past president (2005) of the Henry James Society and was Secretary-General of the European Association for American Studies, 2011-14. His recent research has been in the area of literature and trauma on the one hand, and Henry James on the other. For the former, he has mainly engaged with the question of how the catastrophes that strike day in, day out, whether they form the legacy of well-recognized repressive political systems like Nazism (for instance in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution) or Apartheid (J. M. Coetzee), or amount to less tangible forms of un-freedom (as in Herman Melville’s Bartleby), make it impossible to achieve more than a very limited ability to act for change, a point he explores in the context of Judith Butler’s theory of the inevitably citational basis of social agency. From a more strictly literary perspective, he has explored (for instance with regard to Henry James’s The American Scene) how the ethical effect of literature must be situated in what he sees as the reader’s syntagmatic participation in the text rather than paradigmatic identification with protagonists. Buelens also takes an interest in finance fictions since the late nineteenth century and how a notion of "speculative selves" might take shape in that context.
