“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 literary scholar and FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven, where I am affiliated with the English Literature and Cultural Studies research groups. I am also a member of the steering committee of the Leuven Centre for Health Humanities, an associate researcher at ULiège, a member of the Advisory Board of Graphic Medicine Europe, and a member of the Board of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE).

My research explores how contemporary life narratives negotiate environmental and health crises, with particular interests in contemporary Anglophone and American literature, life writing and autobiography, environmental humanities and ecocriticism, health humanities and narrative medicine, comics and graphic medicine, rhetoric and rhetorical narratology, and comparative literature. My current FWO-funded project, “The Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia (Graphic) Memoir,” examines how memoirs and autobiographical comics evoke schizophrenia as a lived, relational, and multi-actor experience, with particular attention to affective and experiential knowledge.

My first monograph, Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene (Quodlibet, 2019), examined the intersections of technology, ecology, and the sublime in Thoreauvian and post-Thoreauvian literature. My second monograph, American Anthropocene Sublimes: Self and Environment in Contemporary Ecobiographical Memoirs, is forthcoming with De Gruyter in October 2026. My work has also appeared in journals and edited volumes including The Yearbook of English Studies, Humanities, Miranda, Épistémocritique, and Liverpool University Press.

I have been awarded competitive research fellowships by the FNRS and FWO, which have supported my research from the doctoral level through my current postdoctoral project. I have also undertaken research stays at the University of Texas at Austin, The Ohio State University, and Vrije Universiteit, and have presented my work at universities and international conferences across Europe and North America.

I have been teaching at university level since 2016, at KU Leuven and ULiège, in both English language and Anglophone literature. My teaching experience ranges from undergraduate courses in literary analysis and English to more specialized courses in American literature, literary criticism, and the environmental and health humanities. I have also independently designed and taught the MA seminar “American Madness: Contemporary U.S. Literature and Mental Health,” which brings together my research interests in American literature, life writing, and health humanities. Alongside my university teaching, I have taught English for Specific Purposes in fields including medicine, public health, law, psychology, and the social sciences, have (co-)supervised and evaluated BA, MA, and PhD theses, and assessed student examinations.

I am also actively involved in academic service, research organization, and public engagement. I have co-edited two international special issues – “Anthropocene Sublimes” (Ecozon@, 2025) and “The Pastoral: New Trajectories in the Anthropocene” (Ecocene, 2021) – and have organized and co-organized conferences, symposia, seminars, and public events on topics ranging from the environmental humanities and the Anthropocene to health humanities, mental health, and graphic medicine. I also regularly contribute to public-facing discussions of literature, ecology, mental health, and American culture.

Alongside my academic work, I am a singer-songwriter and musician. My music is available at davidlombardmusic.net.