“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

PhD student, University of Liège / University of Leuven (joint degree)

I’m 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’m a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics (CIPA), Intersections, and the Leuven English Literature Research Group.

I was also a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin (fall 2022) and the Ohio State University (spring 2023) in the United States.

Since 2018, I have been mainly working and publishing in the fields and areas of contemporary American literature and culture, life writing, theories of the sublime, Henry David Thoreau and American transcendentalism, the environmental humanities, rhetorical narrative theory, comparative literature, and the health humanities. 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 broader PhD project titled “American Anthropocene Sublimes: Rhetorics and Narrations of Self and Environment in the Contemporary Ecobiographical Memoir” (2020-2024).

In addition, my essays and book reviews have been published 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 “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 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. 

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