Ghent University | Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

LITRA

Centre for Literature and Trauma

Stef Craps

BIOGRAPHY

Stef Craps is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen) affiliated with the English Department at Ghent University, where he was formerly an assistant professor. In the spring of 2009 he was a fellow of the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC), a Brussels-based institute of advanced study, and during the current academic year he is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He holds degrees from Leuven University (PhD, licentiate), Hull University (MA), and the Catholic University of Brussels (candidate).

Stef Craps His PhD research led to a dissertation on trauma and ethics in the novels of the contemporary British author Graham Swift, which he has reworked into a book (Sussex Academic Press, 2005). He has also co-edited a special double issue of Studies in the Novel on postcolonial trauma novels (2008; with Gert Buelens) and published various articles on modern English literature in both journals and books. At present he is working on a monograph entitled Postcolonial Witnessing: The Trauma of Empire, the Empire of Trauma, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, and co-editing an essay collection on the topic of transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory (with Michael Rothberg).

Much of his postdoctoral 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 gross human-rights violations.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Craps, Stef. "Learning to Live with Ghosts: Postcolonial Haunting and Mid-Mourning in David Dabydeen's 'Turner' and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts." Callaloo. 6,000 words. [forthcoming]
Craps, Stef. "'Only Not beyond Love': Testimony, Subalternity, and the Famine in the Poetry of Eavan Boland." Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature. 5,500 words. [forthcoming]
Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: The Trauma of Empire, the Empire of Trauma. Under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.
Craps, Stef. "Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective." Textual Practice. 7,500 words. [forthcoming]
Craps, Stef, and Gert Buelens, eds. Postcolonial Trauma Novels. Spec. double issue of Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008). 237 pp. Available through Project MUSE. Contributors: 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, Anne Whitehead.
Craps, Stef, and Gert Buelens. "Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels." Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008): 1-12.
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 (Spring-Summer 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. “J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and the Ethics of Testimony.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 88.1 (Feb. 2007): 59-66.
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.
Craps, Stef. "'All the Same Underneath'? Alterity and Ethics in Graham Swift's Last Orders." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.4 (Summer 2003): 405-20. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 233. Detroit: Gale, 2007. 405-20.

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