Ghent University | Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

LITRA

Centre for Literature and Trauma

Stijn Vervaet

BIOGRAPHY

Stijn Vervaet is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen) affiliated with the Department of Slavonic and East European Studies at Ghent University, where he received his PhD in 2007.

Stijn Vervaet His PhD research, funded by the Flemish Research Council, resulted in a dissertation on the construction of national identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Austro-Hungarian epoch (1878-1918) on the basis of literary texts from the epoch. It focuses on the question of how the three main ethnic groups (Orthodox, Muslims, and Catholics) strived to articulate a specific national identity by using discursive, textually mediated means (i.e., stereotypical imagery of selfhood and otherness). In addition, it investigates the extent to which these national narratives were influenced by the centrally controlled colonial discourse of the Dual Monarchy about Bosnia as its newly acquired province.

His current research focuses on the ways in which Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian prose from the 1990s onwards represents the past and how these representations become a part of the collective memory. Through a number of case studies, it analyses the narrative strategies of the representation of history and explores the way in which literature shapes, transforms, reflects, and circulates individual and collective memory.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Vervaet, Stijn. “Writing War, Writing Memory: The Representation of the Recent Past and the Construction of Cultural Memory in Contemporary Bosnian Prose.” Neohelicon. 9,000 words. [forthcoming]
Vervaet, Stijn. “‘Naš car ima za svašta zakon’: Kolonijalna modernost i nacionalni identitet u bosanskohercegovačkoj književnosti austrougarskog razdoblja.” Slavistična revija 57.3 (2009): 467-81.
Vervaet, Stijn. “‘Na granicama civilizovane Evrope’: Austrougarska tekstualna kolonizacija Bosne i Hercegovine (1878-1918).” Sveske Zadužbine Ive Andrića 24 (2007): 90-126.

CONTACT