Sara Buekens is Assistant Professor in Literature in French. She studied Latin and French Linguistics and Literature at Ghent University and Paris IV-Sorbonne University, and received her PhD in Literary Studies from Ghent University in 2020. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Idaho, funded by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (2021-2022), and at Ghent University, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) (2020-2024).
Her research focuses on the representation of nature and ecological issues in African Francophone literature: she uses the methodology of ecopoetics, postcolonial ecocriticism and zoopoetics to study how the literary imagination accounts for environmental concerns, with a focus on stylistic and narratological features used to express the specificity of ecological issues in French and French-language Belgian and African literature.
Recent publications include Émergence d'une littérature environnementale (Droz, 2020) and the edited volumes Animal et animalité: stratégies de représentation dans les littératures d’expression française (in collaboration with Julien Defraeye, Classiques Garnier, 2022), L’Horizon écologique des fictions contemporaines (in collaboration with Pierre Schoentjes and Riccardo Barontini, Droz, 2022) and Les ambiances dans les littératures de langue française du XIXe siècle à nos jours (in collaboration with Adina Balint, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2024).
She is the editor-in-chief of Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine.
