Zoë Van Cauwenberg is a PhD candidate in history at Ghent University and literary studies at KU Leuven. In Ghent, she can be found at the history department and is part of the research group GEMS. In February-March 2023, Zoë was a visiting student researcher at the department of English at UC Berkeley under the supervision of prof. Ian Duncan.
Her passion for the past brought her to Ghent University to pursue a degree in history. She obtained her master in 2017 with a dissertation on Renaissance alchemy. Although her interest in research was already incited, she decided to follow her heart back to English literature. Opting for a study that allowed her to combine her background as a historian with literary studies, she gained an MA in historical linguistics and literature from that same university in 2020.
An interest in Scotland and Romanticism led her to KU Leuven, where she is currently working on a joint PhD with Ghent University. In the FWO-funded project, History as Fairy-ground: Scottish and Irish Female Voices and the Gothic Imagination, she navigates the fragile boundaries between historiography and literary production in the Romantic period (c. 1780-1830). Her research focuses on how female authors mediate Scottish and Irish cultural history and draws attention to the affective and topographic dimensions of their writings in the recruitment of the past. The project draws on book-historical methods, archipelagic feminism and paratext studies to examine how they mediate between orality and print culture, regional traditions and British culture, and the past and present.
Questions about cultural heritage, canon-formation and gender are central to her research. She has presented and published on orality and history in the works of Anne Bannerman and Mary St. John, Romantic and Gothic connections in the lyrics of Taylor Swift and the Gothic heroine in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Broader research interests include British Romantic literature, intellectual and cultural history, romance tradition, gender studies, book history, and, history of science.
