Biography

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, an interdisciplinary research group focused on memory and trauma as mediated through culture. He has held visiting positions at UCLA, Birkbeck, Columbia University, the School of Advanced Study, and the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts.

His research centres on literature’s engagement with the afterlives of violence, drawing on memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. He explores how literary and cultural texts respond to histories of injustice, suffering, and loss, and how they participate in processes of witnessing, repair, and reimagining.

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), a co-author of Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). He has also (co-)edited special issues of Memory Studies Review, American Imago, Studies in the Novel, Criticism, and Collateral on topics including climate witnessing, ecological grief, climate fiction, and transcultural Holocaust memory.

His current work examines how contemporary literature and culture grapple with the representational, affective, and ethical challenges posed by climate change and the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process. Aesthetic practices, he argues, can help us register slow violence, metabolize grief, and cultivate forms of care and responsibility that extend beyond the human. He considers how such practices can open up imaginative space for more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting a damaged planet.

As founding coordinator of the Mnemonics network, Craps facilitates the organization of its annual summer school, which provides doctoral training in memory studies. The network brings together partner institutions from across Europe and the United States, and welcomes applications from PhD students worldwide.

For more information, visit his personal website at www.stefcraps.com.

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