post-MESH lab

People

Core Members

Simona Adinolfi is a postdoc at Ghent University and Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany). Her PhD project examined contemporary novels of migration using a critical posthumanities framework to show how canonical themes usually associated with narratives of migration are being subverted and complicated on a formal level. Her research interests include narrative theory, the critical posthumanities, migration studies, as well as questions of memory and narrative identity.

Lou Braibant (he/they) is an FWO-funded Doctoral Researcher at Ghent University’s Department of Literary Studies, where they investigate the construction of child figures in contemporary American eco-comics and how graphic narratives, as a networked medium, can reshape beliefs about the child in a changing world. The key theoretical framework Lou employs is the com-post child, inspired by Donna Haraway, to recenter the more-than-human and other-than-human aspects of child-nature entanglements. Lou's other interests beyond ecocriticism and comics studies are (but not limited to): intermedia studies, zine studies, queer studies, and decolonial perspectives.

Marco Caracciolo is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. He led the NARMESH project until July 2022. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). He is the author of several books, including most recently Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (De Gruyter, 2023).

Gabriele D'Amato is a joint PhD student at the University of L’Aquila (Italy) and at Ghent University (Belgium). He obtained his MA in Italian Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy), with a thesis in literary theory (supervisor: Prof. Federico Bertoni). His PhD project, supervised by Prof. Federico Bertoni and Prof. Marco Caracciolo, examines multiperspective narratives across media, exploring different forms and functions of multiperspectivity in contemporary fiction through cognitive and transmedial narratological tools. He is particularly interested in questions of transmediality, theory of the novel, and narratology.

Ciarán Kavanagh is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium, where he is pursuing a three-year research project entitled "Science Fiction and Seriousness." His reader-oriented research focuses on how the concept of seriousness is formed and debated in science fiction’s discursive cultures. He is the author of the forthcoming Refiguring Reader Response: Experience and Interpretation in Contemporary Fiction (University of Nebraska Press).

Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. Her work on topics like science and narrative, environmental affect, and the nonhuman in literature has been published in journals such as American Imago, ISLE, and SubStance. She is author of the Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature: Bodies of Knowledge (Bloomsbury 2024).

Jordi Serrano-Muñoz is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, where he investigates disasters as a narrative device in contemporary environmental fiction. His research examines how this trope shapes our understanding of threats associated with the climate crisis, speculative fiction, and questions of ecofeminist care, based on a body of works from Japan, Mexico, and Australia. Previously, he held teaching positions at the Open University of Catalonia and the University of Granada, and conducted postdoctoral research at Waseda University (2021-2022) and El Colegio de Mexico (2020-2021). His current research interests lie at the intersection of ecocriticism, comparative literature, and transpacific connections.

Kai Qing Tan (she/he/they) is FWO postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, Belgium and associate of the Aachen Center for Cognitive and Empirical Literary Studies (ACCELS), Germany. Kai’s current research investigates the embodied reading of disability experiences and intersectionality in North American graphic narrative (since the 1990s) and the post-reading social impact through 4EA approaches to cognition and empirical literary studies. Kai practises psychogeography and is an active member of the Association of Literary Urban Studies, the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, the Comic Forschung Gesellschaft, FRINGE Urban Narratives and the research group on visceral writing and affect transmission as feminist strategy.

Alexander Vandewalle is a postdoctoral researcher who specializes in the reception of antiquity, history, and mythology in video games. For his PhD thesis (2024), he investigated the characterization of Greek mythological figures in games. He has previously published or presented on various aspects of classical reception in games (e.g., aesthetics, intertextuality, pedagogy, epigraphy, haptics), characterization, player experiences, game development, game analysis methodology, and wider pop-cultural franchises (e.g., Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe). He is also the founder of Paizomen, a work-in-progress database of games set in ancient Greece and Rome), and the author of Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (2026, Bloomsbury Academic). .

Jonas Vanhove is a PhD student at Ghent University working on his PhD project "Narrative, Metaphor and Metamorphosis: The Ecological Potential of Contemporary Children’s Literature," which explores the formal and stylistic affordances of children’s literature as it grapples with the imaginative challenges posed by the Anthropocene. He obtained an MA in Comparative Modern Literature summa cum laude, was awarded a special research fund by Ghent University, and is currently the recipient of an FWO fellowship. His interests are children’s literature and childhood, ecocriticism, and cognitive literary theory. His first article, on visual depictions of temporality in children’s picture books, will be published open access in October 2024.

Hongri Wang is an FWO junior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, with a project entitled The Anthropocene Unseen: A Comparative Study of Contemporary American and Chinese Environmental Fiction. She completed her PhD in 2024 with an econarratological study of scalar complexities in contemporary American climate change fiction. She worked with the post-MESH Lab as a visiting PhD researcher (September 2022–October 2023), and served as an assistant professor at Tongji University (2024–2025), where she received a Youth Project funded by the China National Social Science Fund. Her research focuses on narratology, ecocriticism, and comparative literature, with particular interest in literature and the Anthropocene.

Visiting Scholars

October 2025-April 2026 | Alessia Vecchi is a PhD student in Philosophy of Language at the University of Milan and Roma Tre University, within the nationally recognized ILF Doctoral Program (Image, Language, Figure: forms and modes of mediation). She is currently a visiting researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. She is a member of CosmicLab and collaborates with the ISTC (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies) at the CNR in Rome. She holds a degree in Classical and Italian Studies from the University of Bologna. Her current doctoral project investigates the mechanisms of identification and perspective-taking in fictional characters, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines literature, cognitive sciences, and social cognition. She has contributed to, and continues to collaborate on, experimental behavioral research projects.

April-May 2025 | Piotr F. Piekutowski is a research fellow at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is a principal investigator of the research grant PRELUDIUM “Poetics of Entanglement: The Nonhuman Side of Polish Literature in Econarratological Approach,” funded by the National Science Centre, Poland. In 2024, he completed his PhD in literary studies with a dissertation on non-anthropocentric narratives in contemporary Polish fiction. His research interests are focused on narrative theory, econarratology, posthumanism, Anthropocene fiction, and 20th and 21st-century Polish prose.

January-June 2025 | Chiara Xausa is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Bologna, the University of Idaho, and Ghent University, with a project on YA climate fiction, econarratology, and empirical and affective ecocriticism. Previously, she has been a postdoctoral fellow in Anglophone literature at the University of Bologna (2022-2024). She completed her PhD in 2022 with a thesis on feminist environmental humanities and dystopian Anthropocene narratives. Her first monograph, titled Intersectional World Making in Climate Fiction: Undoing the Anthropocene Master Narrative, will be published by Peter Lang in 2025.

September 2024-August 2025 | Xianmin Shen is an Assistant Professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Her research interests include ecocriticism, gender studies and teacher education. She is currently working on a project on communities in Barbara Kingsolver’s writing funded by the National Social Science Foundation. At Ghent, she will join Prof. Caracciolo’s post-MESH group and focus on econarratology in contemporary climate fictions.

March 2024 | Selina-Marie Scholz works as a research fellow in the department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She is currently writing her dissertation on the topic of narrative disorientation in climate fiction, where she predominantly draws on insights from cognitive literary studies and econarratological approaches. She holds a BA in English Literatures and German Literatures and an MA in English Literatures and Cultures from the University of Stuttgart.

January-April 2024 | Martina Manfredi Selvaggi is a PhD student at Sapienza University of Rome. She collaborates with the feminist laboratory “Sguardi sulle differenze” and the Gender Studies department at the same university. Her doctoral project aims to identify the models of existence and relationships “exposed” in Italian literary texts – concentrating on De Amicis, Baccini, Aleramo, and Papini – with a particular focus on the embodied dimension within a transdisciplinary perspective. This approach aligns with the principles of Embodied Cognition and Embodied Narratology.

July-December 2023 | Marco Tognini is a PhD student at the University of Milan (Italy) and currently a visiting PhD at Ghent University. His project explores the reconfiguration of the traditional Republic of Letters with the advent of the Web and the birth of various online communities. His research interests include the relationship between ethics and narrative, contemporary literary nonfiction and hermeneutics. He has co-edited the special issue "Literature and the Web: Alliances, Oppositionality, Strategies" (Enthymema 2022).