“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

Doctoral Researcher, University of Liège/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

I am a research fellow at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and a PhD candidate in literary studies at the ULiège and KU Leuven (joint degree), where I am researcher at the units/centers Traverses, the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (CIPA), Intersections, and the Leuven Research Group English Literature. My main fields of interests are American (literary) studies, environmental humanities, narratology, and rhetorical theory. I am the author of the book Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2019), which served as an extended pilot study for my broader PhD project on the rhetorics and narratologies of the sublime in the contemporary American environmental novel and memoir. 

In addition, I have teaching experience, having taught English and Spanish for a few months at Belgian high schools and then 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). Although I am no longer a teacher but a researcher, I am occasionally invited to teach classes and to give lectures whose topics are closely related to my research project or to the fields of American studies and/or environmental humanities. 

My favorite places to think and do research are as much the bustling centers of Liège, where I am currently based, and Leuven as the wooded south of Belgium, places which enrich my reflections on the techno-nature of the Anthropocene.

I am also a singer-songwriter and musician. Check out my music output on this website