“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

– Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau 

David Lombard

Postdoctoral Researcher

I am a Belgian postdoctoral researcher at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) affiliated with the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), where I work within the English Literature and Cultural Studies research groups. I am also a member of the steering committee of the Leuven Center for Health Humanities and an associate researcher at the University of Liège (ULiège).

I did my Ph.D. in literature and literary studies as a joint degree between ULiège and KU Leuven (2020–24), with a dissertation titled “American Anthropocene Sublimes: Rhetorics and Narrations of Self and Environment in the Contemporary U.S. Ecobiographical Memoir.”

During my Ph.D. and postdoctoral mandate, I have been a visiting scholar at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands (2025) and the Ohio State University (2023) and the University of Texas at Austin (2022) in the United States. 

Since 2018, I have been mainly working, publishing, and teaching in the fields and areas of American literature (from the nineteenth century to the present), life writing studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, the health humanities, aesthetic theory and theories of the sublime, and comparative literature.

I am the author of the book Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene (2019), which served as an extended pilot study for my PhD project, and of multiple enclyclopedia entries, book reviews, blog articles, and essays published/accepted for publication in edited volumes as well as in peer-reviewed academic journals such as The Yearbook of English Studies, Épistémocritique, and Miranda.

My editing work mainly consists of two co-edited special issues, one with Stefano Rozzoni on “The Pastoral: New Trajectories in the Anthropocene” (Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental  Humanities, December 2021) and one with Alison Sperling and Pieter Vermeulen on “Anthropocene Sublimes” (Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, Spring 2025). I am also a member of the editorial team of the online journal Graphic Medicine Review (GMR), and I was an associate editor for the U.S. studies academic association and research blog PopMeC (2021–24).

Besides, I have significant teaching experience. I have taught English and Spanish for a few months at Belgian high schools, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) classes for three years at the Institut Supérieur des Langues Vivantes, and Anglophone literature and literary criticism classes at ULiège and KU Leuven. I am also occasionally invited to give guest/class lectures whose topics are closely related to my research projects. 

Lastly, I am a singer-songwriter and musician. For my music output, please visit this website.