Kristiaan Versluys holds a Ph. D.-degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (1979). He is Professor of American literature and culture at Ghent University (Belgium) and the founding director of the Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST). He published a study on city poetry and some sixty scholarly (book) articles in international journals and collections. His book, entitled Out of the Blue. September 11 and the Novel, was published by Columbia University Press in the fall of 2009. His specialties are urban literature (especially the literature of New York) and Jewish-American fiction.Versluys was president of the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association (1989-1992) and secretary of the European Association for American Studies (1992-1994). He was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in 2004-2005. He taught at Fordham University as a Fulbright Lecturer in the spring semester of 1989 and he was a regular guest professor at Columbia University between 1989 and 2008. In 2001 he was elected as a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.In 2007-8 he was educational director of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. Since October 2008 he is the Director of Education of Ghent University. He is responsible for the general educational policy of the university as well as for quality assurance, counselling services, registration procedures, curriculum development, rules and regulations and internationalization.
