Stef Craps
I am a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where I direct the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative - an interdisciplinary research group focused on memory and trauma as mediated through culture. I have held visiting positions at UCLA, Birkbeck, Columbia University, the School of Advanced Study, and the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts.
My research centres on literature’s engagement with the afterlives of violence, drawing on memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. I explore how literary and cultural texts respond to histories of injustice, suffering, and loss, and how they participate in processes of witnessing, repair, and reimagining.
I am the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift (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). I have also (co-)edited special issues of Memory Studies Review, American Imago, Studies in the Novel, Criticism, and Collateral on topics including climate witnessing, ecological grief, climate fiction, and transcultural Holocaust memory.
My current work examines how contemporary literature and culture grapple with the representational, ethical, and affective challenges posed by climate change and the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process. Aesthetic practices, I argue, can help us register slow violence, metabolize grief, and cultivate forms of care and responsibility that extend beyond the human. I consider how such practices can open up imaginative space for more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting a damaged planet.
As founding coordinator of the Mnemonics network, I facilitate 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.
My research centres on literature’s engagement with the afterlives of violence, drawing on memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. I explore how literary and cultural texts respond to histories of injustice, suffering, and loss, and how they participate in processes of witnessing, repair, and reimagining.
I am the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift (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). I have also (co-)edited special issues of Memory Studies Review, American Imago, Studies in the Novel, Criticism, and Collateral on topics including climate witnessing, ecological grief, climate fiction, and transcultural Holocaust memory.
My current work examines how contemporary literature and culture grapple with the representational, ethical, and affective challenges posed by climate change and the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process. Aesthetic practices, I argue, can help us register slow violence, metabolize grief, and cultivate forms of care and responsibility that extend beyond the human. I consider how such practices can open up imaginative space for more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting a damaged planet.
As founding coordinator of the Mnemonics network, I facilitate 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.
less
InterestsView All (18)
Uploads
Books by Stef Craps
Swift’s texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. This study charts the entire trajectory of Swift’s engagement with the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of navigating a post-traumatic condition, proceeding from an emphasis on denial in his early work, through an intense preoccupation with the demands of trauma in the “middle-period” novels (including Waterland), to a seemingly liberating insistence on regeneration and renewal in Last Orders and The Light of Day.
By providing a wide-ranging and in-depth analysis of Swift’s novels against the background of the “ethical turn” in literary studies and the emergence of trauma theory, this book extends and enriches our understanding of what is arguably one of the most significant literary oeuvres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Essays by Stef Craps
Maar in werkelijkheid is dat natuurlijk niet zo: er is grote ongelijkheid in de mondiale verdeling van verantwoordelijkheid en kwetsbaarheid voor klimaatverandering. Diegenen die het minst verantwoordelijk zijn voor klimaatverandering worden het hardst getroffen door de gevolgen ervan. Het Westen, dat historisch gezien verantwoordelijk is voor de meeste uitstoot van broeikasgassen, is het minst kwetsbaar; het Globale Zuiden is het meest kwetsbaar. Naast geografische locatie zijn ras, gender en socio-economische status bepalende factoren voor kwetsbaarheid voor klimaatverandering: mensen van kleur, vrouwen en mensen in armoede lopen meer kans om getroffen te worden dan witte mensen, mannen en rijke mensen.
In dit artikel zal ik de manier bespreken waarop de literatuur en de literatuurstudie omgaan met kwesties van klimaatrechtvaardigheid, na die eerst te kaderen binnen de ruimere theorievorming rond het antropoceen. De focus zal niet uitsluitend liggen op teksten die verschillen in verantwoordelijkheid en kwetsbaarheid voor klimaatverandering expliciet thematiseren maar evenzeer op teksten die ze schijnbaar of effectief uit de weg gaan. Aan de hand van de casus van een door mij gedoceerd mastervak over de literaire verbeelding van de klimaatcrisis zal ik een lans breken voor een geëngageerd literatuuronderzoek en -onderwijs die actief bijdragen aan het nastreven van klimaatrechtvaardigheid.
This essay will explore how literature, and art more generally, serves as a cultural laboratory for articulating and dealing with grief related to environmental loss, which remains largely unspoken and unrecognized. The act of naming the often disenfranchised and marginalized forms of grief arising from environmental loss is a major step in bringing them to public awareness and granting them social acceptance and legitimacy so that they can be processed more effectively. Coming to terms with ecological grief can inspire efforts to work through it and reinvigorate practices of environmental advocacy in the face of the daunting ecological challenges confronting global society in the twenty-first century.
The essay consists of three parts. First, I will explain why the very idea of ecological mourning meets with strong resistance in some quarters. I will go on to discuss the phenomenon of glacier funerals, which has helped ecological mourning overcome that resistance and go mainstream in recent years. I will end by discussing a newly published novella that offers a profound meditation on its perils, pitfalls, and possibilities: The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade.