Research Projects

2024–2027

The Twenty-First-Century Schizophrenia Memoir and Graphic Memoir: A Rhetorical-Narratological and Multi-Actor Materialist Approach

Postdoctoral project funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)

This project will study the twenty-first-century schizophrenia memoir and graphic memoir in its cultural and diagnostic contexts.

Since the rise of the Mad Pride and neurodiversity movements early in the century, perceptions of mental illnesses have shifted, which calls for a reconsideration of the patient-clinician-caregiver relationship and for the reconceptualization of illnesses and illness identities.

In parallel with these shifts, both western psychotherapy and the memoir genre have been resolutely more focused on the self and on relationality.

This project will expand these crucial discussions in the interdisciplinary field of health humanities by analyzing a carefully curated corpus of twenty-first-century memoirs and graphic memoirs written by people with schizophrenia or by their caregivers in English or in French.

Adopting a methodologically innovative interdisciplinary approach with a rhetorical-narratological, multi-actor materialist, and comparative perspective, it aims to investigate the forms, functions, and relations of the historically important genre of the schizophrenia memoir in its multiple twenty-first-century contexts.

By dissecting the narrative features, affects, rhetorical aims, and institutional dimensions of these texts, this project will develop a multi-actor materialist understanding of schizophrenia that holds the potential to open new avenues in therapy and contribute to minimizing normative behaviors toward mental illnesses.

2020–2024

American Anthropocene Sublimes: Rhetorics and Narrations of Self and Environment in the Contemporary Ecobiographical Memoir

PhD project funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.–FNRS)

This PhD dissertation explores the affordances and limits of the sublime for figuring modes of materiality and non/human agency in contemporary American ecobiographical memoirs.

Because the sublime has a particularly contested literary and cultural history in the United States, where the ‘American sublime’ has been conflated with problematic notions such as the wilderness and the frontier, and technology, the five chapters of this dissertation offer ecocritical and rhetorical-narratological analyses of five environments and/or activities (mountains/mountaineering, hunting, agriculture, atomic power, and oil extraction) and related so-called ‘American Anthropocene sublimes’ (mountain, animal, agricultural, nuclear, and petroleum sublimes).

Situated at the intersection of the fields of American literary studies, environmental humanities, autobiography studies, and rhetorical-narratology, it develops, in doing so, an updated multifaceted understanding of the (American) sublime in the Anthropocene.

More specifically, by systematically drawing on recent reconceptualizations of the sublime (e.g., the ‘haptic sublime’ and the ‘toxic sublime’) and confronting these notions with the sublimes considered in each chapter as well as contiguous categories (e.g., the ‘stuplime’ and the ‘eerie’) in its comparative textual analysis, this dissertation articulates the sublime as a key procedure for representing and apprehending non/human agency and Anthropocene entanglements.