GEMS in portraits: dr. Christopher Chan

William Hogarth’s painting The Distrest Poet (c. 1736), source: Wikimedia Commons. Poets were often satirically portrayed as struggling impoverished hack writers. In his project, Chris thinks in part about the similarities and differences between such satirical portrayals and how actual labouring poets thought about their craft.

GEMS in Portraits: Dr. Christopher Chan

I recently had the chance to talk to new GEMS member Dr. Chris Chan for our GEMS in Portraits series. Chris completed his PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 with a dissertation called Communal Lyricisms and the Lyricization of English Poetry, 1650–1790. In his project he aims to construct a new literary, social and political history of eighteenth-century British lyrical poetry by turning to how more uncommon genres (such as labouring class poetry, political exile poetry and anti-slavery poetry) engaged with the lyric form. He recently moved to Belgium to start a BOF postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Literary Studies at UGent where he is expanding his dissertation project into a monograph. While he’s busy settling in in Ghent, Chris still found the time to chat about his current research interests and first impressions of teaching and working at UGent.

How did your interest in your research arise?

When I was a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, for the first three years I had no idea what I wanted to study and which burning questions I wanted to address. I felt like I knew a lot about eighteenth-century poetry, but I didn’t know how to put that to scholarly use. Then, for a mandatory graduate seminar, we were required to write a single, 25-word sentence explaining what our projects were, and in a moment of panic I wrote: “my project rereads lyric across the eighteenth century, not as private or interiorized expression, but rather as the enabling condition for a British public national consciousness.” Looking back, it was the first time that I asked myself a question which had nagged me throughout my exam reading: why were so many theorists of lyric poetry so interested primarily in private and interiorized poetry and poets rather than more explicitly public and national ones? Why was lyric poetry so often theorized in these abstract and apolitical terms? The more I thought about it, the more I realized it probably has to do with the historiography of lyric poetry: the idea that critics presume that somehow the eighteenth century just didn’t have much lyric poetry worth writing about until poets learned to tap into the emotions or imagination. That’s how my idea arose to trace a new history of eighteenth-century lyric poetry and theory, to show that poets and their interlocutors understood lyric to be a really flexible medium for political and social expression.

Do you consider your research to be interdisciplinary?

I often personally feel that my research to date on eighteenth-century poetry has been primarily literary. I feel as though I have spent most of my time and energy interrogating the making of a poetic mode, the ways we have read that poetic mode and how that making shaped later discourses and methods of reading poetry. That’s why I think of this as a very literary project. At the same time, I’m extremely interested in putting poems and theories of poetry in contact with events, subjects and themes that have long been ignored in lyric theory, such as political exile, urban poverty and manual labour. I’m not sure if this ethos counts as interdisciplinary, but I do see it as a much-needed extension of literary theories of poetry into realms and genres that are so often classified as non-lyrical or non-poetic, precisely because these defy expectations of what poets do or should write about. I’m certainly very interested in the intersections of poems and their environments and how poems circulate in their material and political environments.

Have you ever experienced a eureka moment in your research?

It’s probably the moment I described earlier, when I discovered my dissertation topic. Second to that is the moment when I figured out what I wanted to say about anti-slavery poetry and eighteenth-century review culture. It took me a long time to figure out how I wanted to read anti-slavery poetry just because there is already so much excellent scholarly criticism on that genre. It was only after a spontaneous moment in my reading, that I realized that there has been comparatively less said about the reception of this poetry. In particular, I noticed two general trends in reviews of anti-slavery poetry. On the one hand, poems which denounced the slave trade would be praised for their political message, but the reviews would offer few excerpts or commentary on their formal and aesthetic features. On the other hand, there were also poems that received much more criticism for their misuse of poetic language and imagination than they did for their antislavery sentiments. This got me thinking: why were these reviewers not thinking of these two ideas—the politics and the poetry—together? Once I started thinking a lot about the matter of reception, I realized that this was a sort of litmus test for how I wanted to read all the genres I wanted to cover in my project: how were these poems, which we now tend to think of as non-lyrical or marginalized, received in their time? What can that reception tell us about how we think of lyric today?

What is the most inspiring study you have read?

One of the most inspiring studies I have read is one by my doctoral advisor, Suvir Kaul’s Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (2000). I consider his study to be foundational to a lot of my research. Any scholar of eighteenth-century poetry widely recognizes just how influential Kaul’s study is in terms of attending to British poets’ engagements and implications in the project of empire building, as well as the technical features and formal innovations of their poetry. For me, this book has always modelled the best kind of criticism that one can practice on poetry of this period. It’s judicious in its close readings, forthright in its methodological claims and capacious in its willingness to put eighteenth-century poetry in dialogue with its historical context. On a more personal note, Poems of Nation is so important to me because it displays the same qualities of scholarly precision, professional clarity and readerly generosity that Suvir showed me as an advisor at the University of Pennsylvania.

And the most recent one?

I have been really fascinated by Dorothy Wang’s Thinking its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary American Poetry (2014). While she works with a completely different literary archive than I do, Wang makes a vital and compelling case for rethinking the methodology of poetics through the legacies of racialization, ethnicization and minoritarian identity in the United States. I find her willingness to read aesthetic and literary forms as social, political and institutional forms to be so admirable. Speaking as a Chinese American myself, I’m especially grateful for the ways in which her close readings of Asian American poets don’t merely hold them up as exceptional figures, but rather as experimental ones, as poets whose practices should get us to rethink everything we think we know about poetry.

Interview by: Fauve Vandenberghe

GEMS in portraits: Sarah Adams

Portrait of Toussaint Louverture, chromolithograph published by George de Baptiste (ca. 1870). Washington D.C.: Library of Congress [LC-DIG-pga-05834].

GEMS in portraits: Sarah Adams

Last Tuesday, I sat down (at a safe distance) with Sarah Adams to talk about the research she has been conducting during the last couple of years as a PhD candidate in Dutch literature. Sarah’s research deals with abolitionist/ameliorist theatre plays written and staged between 1770 and 1810 in the Netherlands, which critically address colonial slavery in the Asian and Atlantic orbits. The aim of the project is to reveal how market-led and racist ideologies are running across her corpus of abolitionist plays. By structuring her research around three classic blackface characters which are traditionally being discerned in theatre historiography (the suffering object, the contented fool and the vengeful rebel), Sarah shows that abolitionist theatre ultimately tried to safeguard a white male subjectivity. As a matter of fact, it was a pretty special day for Sarah: just a moment before our meeting, she received the first printed copy of her doctoral thesis Repertories of Slavery, which she is about to defend publicly come December 10th.

How did your interests in your research arise?

“In 2013, I studied at Newcastle University as a part of an Erasmus programme. There I followed a course called ‘Writing the New World’, which was taught by Professor Matthew Grenby. In one of the lectures, we discussed The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), an autobiographic account of a formerly enslaved Nigerian man who was manumitted and brought to Europe, where he committed himself to the abolitionist cause in the British parliament. I was absolutely fascinated by his story. In my BA thesis, I went on to investigate the abolitionist discourse of eighteenth-century Dutch texts. Remarkably, I didn’t find any autobiographical accounts like that of Equiano, but mostly theatre plays, like Kraspoekol, of de slaaverny and Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf. Contrary to England, postcolonial studies in the Netherlands (and Belgium) still make up a kind of wasteland yet to cultivate.”

Do you consider your work interdisciplinary?

“Yes, I do. My research is discourse-oriented and centres on white self-representation, but also on power relations and racialized oppression. I guess discourse analyses are by definition interdisciplinary. To give an example: in my chapter on the character of the contented fool, I delve into early modern uses of blackface in the theatre. In it, I show how the history of blackface in the early modern theatre is intertwined with shifting ideas concerning race, science and capitalism. In this sense, I set up a dialogue between literary and non-literary texts, like political and scientific treatises.”

Have you ever experienced a Eureka moment in your research?

Absolutely—in the Fall of 2019, I had an experience of what you might call ‘archival satisfaction’. In a book by Eberhard Rebling about ballets in the Amsterdam schouwburg, published in 1950, I came across a drawing by François Joseph Pfeiffer, who was the schouwburg’s costume designer around 1800. The drawing showed the costume for two enslaved sub-Saharan African characters, with a blackened complexion and stereotypical attributes like a tambourine and a spear. Rebling’s book indicated that the drawing was kept in the Amsterdam Six Collection. Yet despite searching this entire collection, I couldn’t find Pfeiffer’s design and the staff assumed the drawing had been sold to a private person. More than a year had gone by, when I visited the TIN (Theater Instituut Nederland, now Allard Pierson). Although the entire TIN-collection had been digitized, and the drawing wasn’t there, a staff member managed to find the drawing at the bottom of a cardboard box which had been mislaid. This drawing is very important to me, since it is the closest we can get to the actual appearance of Africanized and enslaved characters on the early modern Dutch stage.”

What is the most inspiring study you have ever read?

“That must be Silencing the Past (1995) by the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who has dedicated his whole career to investigating how historiography and the acquisition of knowledge are related to power. According to Trouillot, historiography is a vast collection of ‘mentions and silences’. These silences are neither natural nor neutral; they are always actively created by dominant voices in society. Trouillot demonstrates this by means of the historiography of the 1791 Haitian Revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. In a couple of days, the rebel leader Toussaint Louverture managed to mobilize tens of thousands of free and enslaved people of colour against the French coloniser, which would eventually result in the foundation of the first black, independent republic in the Caribbean in 1804. Trouillot shows that from the beginning on, the European metropoles framed the Haitian Revolution as an isolated case, which was completely depoliticized, criminalized and banalized. This was, of course, a strategy to make slave-led resistance to colonial subjection consonant with the white dominant order—Africans and their descendants were held in an unnegotiable subservient position and for them to envision freedom was ‘unthinkable,’ to use Trouillot’s term. Only recently, the Revolution of 1791 has been recognized as a crucial moment in modern history, which is reflected in the fact that more and more researchers include the Haitian Revolution into their account of the so-called ‘Age of Revolution’. Silencing the Past is an accessible study and makes researchers aware of the fact that they as well are inevitably mentioning some voices, while silencing others.” 

And the most recent one?

“De Slavernij in Oost en West. Het Amsterdam onderzoek, a volume edited by Pepijn Brandon, Guno Jones, Nancy Jouwe and Matthias van Rossum). It appeared only a couple of days ago and came about at the request of the Amsterdam city council, which will take the book as a point of reference in its decision on whether or not to offer formal apologies for the city’s colonial past. The conclusion of the editors is that Amsterdam was involved in the institution of slavery on a global scale and for a long period of time, and that this past continues to affect modern-day Amsterdam. The speech delivered by mayor Femke Halsema at the book presentation on September 29, 2020, was actually hopeful, so I expect there will be apologies in the near future. This book is of utmost importance in the campaign to raise public awareness of the country’s colonial past.”

— Tom Laureys

GEMS in Portraits: Jonas Roelens

While all GEMS activities have been postponed in these strange times, research and teaching continues. In the middle of marking exams, Jonas Roelens found the time to answer some questions for our GEMS in Portraits series. He is by no means a background character of GEMS, his victory in the 2019 PhD Cup has brought him a lot of fame. We are of course very proud to have him as a GEMS member. Jonas completed his PhD on sodomy in the late medieval and early modern Southern Low Countries in 2018 and currently teaches at the KASK/HoGent and will take up a position to teach gender history at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. What’s more, he has just been awarded a FWO postdoc mandate, which enables him to continue his research at the UGent history department. Let’s hear what inspires this ambitious researcher.

How did your interest in your research arise?
Honestly, there are a lot of coincidences involved in the fact that I am doing research into early modern sodomy. About a decade ago, I was desperately looking for a subject for my bachelor paper. As a student, I quite liked the ‘big city life’ Ghent had to offer and, consequently, I had postponed the decision about my research topic to the very last minute. The night before the deadline, my eye caught Germain Greer’s coffee table book The Boy, about the fleeting beauty of boys throughout the ages. Rather impulsively, I decided to write a paper about homoeroticism in Italian Renaissance art. Never have I been more grateful for my tendency to procrastinate than that day. Besides coffee table books, a complete field of research about same-sex desires in the past unfolded before my eyes. The paper led to a thesis about the impact of two sodomy trials on the formation of an urban memory in early modern Ghent and that thesis eventually led to my PhD dissertation. 

Detail from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch (c.1490-1500). Museo del Prado, P002823.

Do you consider your research to be interdisciplinary?
From its onset, the field of gender studies has indeed been a very interdisciplinary field of research, so naturally, I also try to pursue this in my own research. In my PhD for instance, I not only wanted to chart the number of sodomy trials in the early modern Southern Netherlands, I also wanted to analyse the urban perception of sodomy. To do so, I collected a wide corpus of sources, ranging from legal documents such as witness reports, interrogations, sentences, accounts etc, to religious treatises, song texts, urban chronicles, engravings, demonological texts and so on. I have tried to write a broad cultural history, applying methods derived from the fields of gender history, legal history, urban history, art history, the history of literature, et cetera.

Have you ever experienced an eureka moment in your research?
I distinctly remember my very first eureka moment, but that was back in the days when I was still writing my master’s thesis. I found an intriguing manuscript in the Ghent University Library describing the execution of several mendicants in 1578. I stormed out the reading room to call my partner: ‘I’ve found something, brilliant!’ Throughout the years, I more or less revived that initial sensation whenever I found a new trial record. But every single time, after a few minutes it dawned on me that ‘Eureka’ is perhaps an inappropriate term because these archival finds deal with actual human beings that were horribly punished for their sexual desires.

What is the most inspiring study you have read recently?
For the past year and a half, I have mainly been teaching a various range of classes at different universities. This involves a lot of work, but after years of focussing on one specific topic, it is also very stimulating to immerse oneself in different themes in a short period of time. Therefore, I decided to catch up on some of the classics in the field of cultural history. Peter Burke’s ‘The Fabrication of Louis XIV’, which focusses on the strategy deployed to create a public image of Louis XIV remains relevant to students today because it allows students to compare how politicians today are constantly creating their public image. In the field of gender history, I really enjoyed the special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (vol. 5. no. 4, 2018) because it focusses on ‘transhistory’, an emerging subdiscipline in the field of gender history. In my opinion, courses in gender history still tend to focus too much on the binary opposition between male and female without taking into account that, both nowadays and in the past, people were aware of a much broader spectrum of gender identities.

by Renée Vulto

GEMS in portraits: Yannice De Bruyn

Busy times (ahead) for Yannice De Bruyn. Finishing a PhD while being a young mother isn’t particularly a walk in the park. Therefore, I was very pleased that she still could find the time for a chat via Skype. Yannice works as a PhD student in the Departments of Literary Studies of the UGent and the VUB (through a joint PhD). She is part of the Dutch-Belgian ITEMP cooperation, in which two PhD students and four promotors are involved. ITEMP stands for ‘Imagineering violence, techniques of early modern performativity in the Northern and Southern Netherlands (1630-1690)’ (see https://itempviolence.wordpress.com/). The aim of the project is to investigate how violence was represented in the early modern Low Countries. In her PhD, Yannice focuses on the ‘how and why’ of the representation of violence in the theatre, particularly by means of four case studies of siege plays. Through the concept of ‘imagineering’, a combination of ‘imagining’ and ‘engineering’, she shows that the representation and imagination of siege were always in interaction. There was no ‘reality’ of siege independent of how it was depicted onstage and throughout other media. Its performance in the theatre shaped the audience’s perception and created expectations that in their turn shaped other representations of the subject. Yannice is now in the final phase of her PhD, which she hopes to have defended by the end of the ongoing academic year. The right moment to shoot some of the questions she actually helped to invent a couple of years ago.

Romeyn de Hooghe – engraving for Govard Bidloo’s De France Wreetheyt, tot Bodegrave, en Swammerdam (1672)

GEMS in portraits: Christophe Madelein

Last Thursday, I had my very own Madelein moment, although not in the way Marcel had it in À la recherche du temps perdu. I got the opportunity to sit down with Christophe Madelein for an interview and some coffees at Vooruit. Christophe did both his PhD and his Postdoc at Ghent University. He also worked as a guest professor at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the Arteveldehogeschool Gent, and was Brueghel Chair at the University of Pennsylvania. Although Christophe is currently unaffiliated, he is still very busy doing research, especially on the poetry of Hubert Korneliszoon Poot. Moreover, he is one of the editors of the Jaarboek Achttiende Eeuw and a jury member for the study group’s thesis prize. We talked about theatre, his book discussion club in Lokeren, and our shared interest in providentialism. And of course, I also had some by now familiar questions to ask.

Hubert Kornelisz. Poot – Op de hoge watervloed, omtrent het einde des jaars MDCCXVII

GEMS in portraits: Annemieke Romein

If there is someone who is not afraid to cross geographical and disciplinary borders, it’s Annemieke Romein, whose research on legislation texts in the seventeenth century has not only brought her from the Netherlands to Ghent, it also took her to Germany, Switzerland, and from the archives to the digital humanities. Annemieke completed her studies and PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam and is currently a NWO Rubicon-fellow working at the UGhent Department of History. Additionally, she is Researcher-in-Residence at the National Library (KB) in The Hague working with digital humanities methods to improve the searchability of early modern legislation texts. Over a coffee in the Vooruit, we discussed how vital it is to conduct comparative research, and how energizing interdisciplinary work can be.

Handwritten ‘vorstelijke ordonnantie’ from Flanders ca. 1619 (RAG_GW8_RvV_772)

GEMS in portraits: Delphine Calle

After defending her PhD on love and passion in the work of Jean Racine in the summer of 2018, GEMS-member Delphine Calle has set course for a year at Rutgers University, New Jersey. She came back to Ghent for the Christmas holidays, so I had the chance to meet her for an interview over a Pain perdu coffee. We talked about bureaucracy, modern art, Thanksgiving and her postdoc project proposal about non-peer friendship in 17th-century France: Friendship across divides. A literary exploration of friendship and equality in 17^th-century France.

GEMS in portraits: Andrew Bricker

This week, I sat down with Andrew Bricker to talk about his research, his work at UGent and his forthcoming book about satire and defamation law; we ended up talking a lot about our shared astonishment at Belgian traffic behaviour and the things we have come to love about Ghent. As an assistant professor in English Literature, Andrew is an expert on satire from the early modern period, but his interests extend to material culture and cognitive approaches to reading. After having studied and worked in Toronto, Prague, Stanford, Montreal and Vancouver, Andrew finally settled in Ghent last year. Now he is sharing his excitement about “old books” with Flemish students (“who are really great, but don’t talk very much – yet when they do talk they have very interesting things to say!”), working on his book Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792, and learning Dutch (which goes “heel goed!”) while exploring Belgium on his bike on the weekends. 

GEMS in portraits: Thomas Donald Jacobs

Last week, I had a pleasant and interesting meeting with Thomas Donald Jacobs from the History Department at Ghent University. Thomas is a doctoral student and a teaching and research assistant. He specializes in Early Modern European discourses about the Americas, as well as the politics and diplomacy of that era. His particular interests lie in border-crossing, the negotiation and representation of Jewish and Native American identity, Charles V’s policies towards New Christians, and Anglo-Hispanic relations during the mid-seventeenth century. In April, he co-organized the 39^th American Indian Workshop “Arrows of Time: Narrating the Past and Present” together with GEMS member Michael Limberger, and Fien Lauwaerts. The conference was a success and caused “just the right amount of controversy”.

GEMS in portraits: Nele De Raedt

The first GEMS in portraits of 2018 is with Nele De Raedt, assistant and doctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning. Nele is now in the final phase of her PhD, writing a dissertation on palace architecture in fifteenth-century Italy under the supervision of Maarten Delbeke and Anne-Françoise Morel. More specifically, the focus of her project concerns practices of violence (defilement, confiscation, destruction) of these palaces, as well as the possible interactions between this culture of violence against buildings and contemporary architectural theory. From January 2015 to June 2016, Nele worked as a research fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut in the research group on Ethics and Architecture. At Ghent University, she enjoys the combination of research and teaching. Recently, she also taught a course in art history as a guest teacher at the KASK School of Fine Arts.