post-MESH lab

People

Core Members

Simona Adinolfi is a PhD student at Ghent University. Her PhD project examines 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.

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 an FWO 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 forthcoming Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature: Bodies of Knowledge (Bloomsbury).

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.

Visiting Scholars

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).

September 2022-October 2023 | Hongri Wang is a PhD student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Her PhD project focuses on contemporary American climate change fiction, particularly on selected works by Barbara Kingsolver, Ben Lerner, Richard Powers, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Drawing upon econarratology and scale critique, her dissertation examines the formal affordances of climate change fiction to negotiate the scalar complexity of the Anthropocene and its potential to expand the reader’s understanding of scale and enhance scalar literacy. Her research interests include Anthropocene literature, ecocriticism and narrative theory.