Prof. Dr. Zoë Ghyselinck

Zoë Ghyselinck is a Visiting Professor of Literary Studies and German and Comparative Literature and Postdoc Coordinator of the Consortium for Health Humanities, Arts, Reading, and Medicine (CHARM). Her research focuses on modern and contemporary portrayals of communication with the deceased, examining mediation and advancements in communication technology. Currently, she is developing a project on anticipatory mourning and the posthumous influence of end-of-life narratives created by terminally ill parents and grandparents in palliative care.

A classical scholar, Zoë is also interested in how ancient literatures and cultures are received in modern contexts. She earned her PhD from Ghent University in 2013, studying the reception of Greek tragedy and the philosophical concept of the tragic in early 20th-century German neoclassical literature. Her first monograph, Form und Formauflösung der Tragödie: Die Poetik des Tragischen und der Tragödie als religiöses Erneuerungsmuster in den Schriften Paul Ernsts (1866–1933), was published by De Gruyter in 2015, exploring the religious foundations of artistic and societal transformations in German neoclassical literature.

She has held various national and international postdoctoral positions, including at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where she received the Udo Keller Grant for Religion and Modernity (2014) for research in the German Literature Archives in Marbach. From 2016 to 2020, she was a Junior Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University through the Flanders Research Foundation and from 2020-2024 a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow (Ghent University) and a Senior Humboldt Fellow (2022-2023) at the University of Regensburg, Germany.

Zoë has co-edited Necrodialogues and Media: Communicating with the Dead in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, part of the Media and Cultural Memory series (in press with Dr. Elena Fabietti). Her upcoming book with Routledge, Communicating with the Dead in Contemporary Western Literature: Spiritual Mediums and Technical Media, examines how literature explores the intersection of media advancements and religious practices related to communication with the deceased.

In 2022, she was elected a member of the Young Academy, Belgium. In April 2025, she was elected Co-Chair, together with prof. Sven Rogge.
She is also deeply engaged in science communication and outreach. Her recent contributions include co-curating the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL (Spring 2024), leading co-creative community-based projects on death literacy, and initiating shared reading programs. In addition, she serves as co-chair of the steering committee for the science communication awards presented by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB) and the Young Academy.