(Nederlandse versie onderaan)
Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University in Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, an interdisciplinary research group focused on memory and trauma as mediated through culture. He has held visiting positions at UCLA, Birkbeck, Columbia University, the School of Advanced Study, and the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts.
His research centres on how literary texts and other cultural forms engage with the legacies and ongoing realities of political violence and ecological devastation. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory, he explores the ways in which such works bear witness to histories of injustice, suffering, and loss, and envision responsibility, repair, and renewal.
Craps is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), a co-author of Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). He has also (co-)edited special issues of scholarly journals on topics such as climate witnessing, ecological grief, climate fiction, and transcultural Holocaust memory. Several of his publications have been translated into other languages, including Czech, Polish, Russian, and Turkish.
His current work examines how contemporary literature and culture grapple with the representational, affective, and ethical challenges posed by climate change and the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process. Aesthetic practices, he argues, can help us register slow violence, work through grief, and cultivate forms of care and connection that extend beyond the human. He is interested in their potential to open up imaginative space for more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting a damaged planet.
As founding coordinator of the Mnemonics network, Craps facilitates the organization of its annual summer school, which provides doctoral training in memory studies. The network brings together partner institutions from across Europe and the United States, and welcomes applications from PhD students worldwide. He also serves on the board of Climate Justice for Rosa, a non-profit advocacy group set up in memory of a teenager who lost her life in the European floods of 2021.
For more information, visit his personal website at www.stefcraps.com.
To schedule an appointment during office hours, visit stefcraps.youcanbook.me.
