“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

Junior Postdoctoral Researcher

I’m a junior postdoctoral researcher at the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) affiliated with the University of Leuven, where I work at the English Literature and the Cultural Studies Research Groups and am a member of the steering committee of the Leuven Center for Health Humanities. I did my Ph.D. in literary studies as a joint degree between the universities of Liège and Leuven in Belgium (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. situated at the intersection of American literary studies, narratology, and the environmental humanities, I was also a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin (fall 2022) and the Ohio State University, at Project Narrative (spring 2023).

Since 2018, I’ve been mainly working and publishing in the fields and areas of contemporary (American) literature and culture, life writing and memoir studies, environmental humanities, health humanities, aesthetic theory and theories of the sublime, Henry David Thoreau and American transcendentalism, rhetoric and rhetorical narratology, and comparative literature.

I’m the author of the book Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), which served as an extended pilot study for my PhD project funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS). In addition, my essays and book reviews have been published in edited volumes as well as in academic journals such as Épistémocritique, Miranda, the Journal of Arts and Media Studies, the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Local Environment, The Trumpeter, and Acta fabula.

My editing work includes a co-edited (with Stefano Rozzoni) special issue on “The Pastoral: New Trajectories in the Anthropocene” (Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental  Humanities, December 2021). In addition, I’m currently co-editing (with Alison Sperling and Pieter Vermeulen) a special focus section of Ecozon@ on “The Anthropocene Sublimes,” which will be published in the spring of 2025, and I’m an associate editor for the U.S. studies academic association and research blog PopMeC.

Besides, I have teaching experience, having taught English and Spanish for a few months at Belgian high schools, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) classes for three years at various faculties of the University of Liège (at the department of Institut Supérieur des Langues Vivantes), and literature and literary criticism classes at the universities of Liège and Leuven. I am also occasionally invited to teach classes and give lectures whose topics are closely related to my research projects or to the broader field of literary and cultural studies.

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