Marysa Demoor, is a senior full professor emerita of English literature and Culture at Ghent University.
Demoor began as a tenured senior researcher with the Flemish Science Foundation (1989-2000) after which she became a tenured research professor at Ghent University. She obtained a full professorship in 2004. She was a member of the UGhent research council from 1998 to 2013. She was the chair of the Humanities committee for the last seven years of that membership. Demoor is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge (UK) since 2001. In 2011 she held the Van Dijck chair at UCLA, USA. Until 2013, she was advisor to the Rector on Diversity and Gender and she was the founder of the policy unit for gender and diversity. In 2013 she established a thinktank of women faculty where policy matters were discussed from the angle of the female academic. In 2014 she founded the peer-reviewed journal DiGeSt, a scholarly journal that publishes on diversity and gender studies.
With the help of PhD students Demoor created the Facebook page for the English literature department in 2012 .
From 2014 to 2021 she was the Director of the Doctoral School, Arts, Humanities and Law. In 2016 she chaired the Literature and Arts committee of the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO). Since 2018 Demoor has been a member of the CIWC panel of the Flemish Science Foundation.
Marysa Demoor was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) in 2023.
Research:
since 1995, Demoor is the director of the Centre for Gender Studies and she was (until 2016) the co-director of the research project RAP (Research on Authorship in Performance).
Demoor effectively started research on nineteenth-century periodical studies at Ghent University and in Flanders with her PhD on Andrew Lang in 1983. Demoor has published widely on Victorian and modernist culture. Book publications include Their Fair Share. Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield (Ashgate, 2000), Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-fashioning (Palgrave, 2004) and with Laurel Brake Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism (Academia Press and British Library 2009; also an e-book for Proquest) and the Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (Palgrave 2009).
Identity, nationhood and histoire croisée are are at the centre of several of her more recent publications. She published a popularising book on the English and Flemish culture in The Fields of Flanders (2002) and several articles on Englishness and Belgium in Nineteenth century Prose (“The Fleshtints of Rubens”), Pre-Raphaelite Studies (“Art-Catholic Revisited: Dante Rossetti’s Early paintings and Northern Renaissance Art” and “’Als Ich Kan’ Flanders and the work of William Morris”) on late nineteenth-century British-Belgian networks in VPR and English Studies. In 2015 she guest-edited a special issue on Waterloo for Victorian Periodicals Review and contributed an article on Waterloo as a Realm of Memory to that issue (see Project Muse). Her interest in British national identity and its entertwinement with the battlefields in and the culture produced by the young state of Belgium culminated in 2022 with her book A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918: Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements published by Palgrave Macmillan ( https://link.springer.com/book/9783030879259) . As the commissioned editor Demoor edited the Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (EUP 2023), in collaboration with with Cedric Van Dijck (VUB) and Birgit Van Puymbroeck (VUB). The volume won the ESPRit prize for 2024. With Lisa Peters, Andrew Hobbs and Beth Gaskell she is currently working on an edition of primary sources to the nineteenth-century periodical press to be published by Routledge in 2025 (4 vols).
Courses taught:
Gender and literature, Victorian Prose, Victorian Poetry, Introduction to prose, Towards Modernism and Beyond, Victorian print culture, Literature, gender and translation, From Waterloo to Wipers (on identity and nationhood in literature)
Research interests:
Gender and literature, literary criticism, Victorian print culture, Victorian poetry, Victorian prose, Modernism, literature and visual culture, Periodical studies, Cross-fertilisation between Belgium (Flanders) and Britain, national identity and literature.
PhD supervision:
Demoor has successfully supervised a large number of PhDs with subjects ranging from Flemish women journalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century over Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, modernist poetry and music to turn-of-the-century artists’ networks, British-French journals and their networks and the impact on feminism of Victorian representations of Boadicea.
