Ghent University | Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

LITRA

Centre for Literature and Trauma

Stef Craps

BIOGRAPHY

Stef Craps is a research professor ("docent BOF-ZAP") in English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Centre for Literature and Trauma (LITRA). Before taking up his current post, he served as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) and an assistant professor at Ghent University. His degrees are from the University of Leuven (PhD, MA), the University of Hull (MA), and the Catholic University of Brussels (BA). He has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in New York and the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC) in Brussels. On sabbatical leave throughout 2013, he will be spending the spring semester in London as a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the School of Advanced Study and an honorary research associate at the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London.

Stef Craps Craps is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), and has guest-edited special issues of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2011; with Michael Rothberg) and Studies in the Novel (2008; with Gert Buelens) on the topics of, respectively, transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory and postcolonial trauma novels. His next book project is an introductory guide to the concept of trauma for Routledge's New Critical Idiom series.

Much of his current research focuses on the ways in which postcolonial literature in English bears witness to the suffering engendered by colonial oppression. Through a number of case studies he investigates the specificity of colonial traumas in relation to the hegemonic trauma discourse, analyses the textual strategies deployed to give them literary form, and explores the ethico-political stakes involved in the postcolonial memory work this literature undertakes. His latest research examines how, why, and to what effect the memory of the Holocaust is evoked in literary texts that connect the Nazi genocide of the European Jews with other exceptionally destructive, criminal, and catastrophic histories, such as slavery, colonialism, and other genocides. Additional research interests include the representation of perpetrators, imaginings of Europe, and memory and human rights.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Craps, Stef. Trauma. New Critical Idiom. Under contract with Routledge.
Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-230-23007-1. 170 pp.
Vermeulen, Pieter, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Ortwin de Graef, Andreas Huyssen, Vivian Liska, and David Miller. “Dispersal and Redemption: The Future Dynamics of Memory Studies - A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 5.2 (2012): 223-39.
Craps, Stef, and Michael Rothberg, eds. Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory. Spec. issue of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 53.4 (2011). 121 pp. With essays by Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, Sarah De Mul, Andreas Huyssen, Michael Rothberg, and Pieter Vermeulen; and reviews by Brett Ashley Kaplan, A. Dirk Moses, and Max Silverman.
Craps, Stef, and Gert Buelens. "Traumatic Mirrorings: Holocaust and Colonial Trauma in Michael Chabon's The Final Solution." Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 53.4 (2011): 569-86.
Craps, Stef. "Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective." Textual Practice 24.1 (2010): 51-68.
Craps, Stef, and Gert Buelens, eds. Postcolonial Trauma Novels. Spec. double issue of Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (2008). 237 pp. Available through Project MUSE. With essays by Victoria Burrows, Stef Craps, Robert Eaglestone, Shane Graham, Rosanne Kennedy, Ana Miller, Laura Murphy, Mairi Neeves, Amy Novak, Petar Ramadanovic, Michael Rothberg, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Anne Whitehead.
Craps, Stef. "Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips's Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood." Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (2008): 191-202.
Craps, Stef. "Conjuring Trauma: The Naudet Brothers' 9/11 Documentary." Canadian Review of American Studies 37.2 (2007): 183-204.
Craps, Stef. Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation. Brighton/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. ISBN: 1-84519-004-1. 230 pp. Published with the support of the Belgian University Foundation. Shortlisted for the 2006 ESSE Book Award.

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