post-MESH lab

People

Core Members

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 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 On Soulsring Worlds: Narrative Complexity, Digital Communities, and Interpretation in Dark Souls and Elden Ring (Routledge, 2025) and Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

Gabriele D'Amato is an FWO junior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. He holds a joint PhD in Literary Studies from Ghent University (Belgium) and the University of L’Aquila (Italy). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Critique, ISLE, Memory Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Storyworlds, and Studies in the Novel. He is the co-editor of three forthcoming special issues (Between, 2026; Storyworlds, 2027; Memory Studies Review, 2028). His first monograph, Multiperspective Narratives across Media: Form, Experience, and Ethics, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2027.

Marion De Schepper is a doctoral researcher in Anglophone literary studies. Her work explores how plants are represented in contemporary and historical literature, with a focus on questions of literary form, memory, affect, and ecology. Marion obtained an MA in Linguistics and Literature (English and Scandinavian Studies) from Ghent University, and an MA in Literary Studies from KU Leuven, the latter an advanced inter-university program jointly offered by the Flemish universities. She wrote her BA and MA theses on plants in British Romantic fiction and poetry. She is currently working on a BOF-funded doctoral research project at Ghent University, supervised by Marco Caracciolo, Stef Craps, and Elly McCausland. This PhD project, titled “Witnessing Plants”, explores literary representations of plants as experiencers and mediators of environmental change in contemporary English-language fiction.

Ciarán Kavanagh is currently an affiliated researcher at Ghent University, where he recently finished a three-year FWO postdoctoral project on the concept of seriousness in science fiction's discursive cultures. His first book, Refiguring Reader-Response: Experience and Interpretation in Contemporary Fiction, is due out with University of Nebraska Press in April 2027. His second book, Science Fiction and the Making of Seriousness, is tentatively slated for a late 2027 release with Palgrave. Ciarán was recently an International Fellow at the KWI, where he broke ground on "In Search of Awe," a new project on awe emotions in science fiction and its reception, particularly in the context of the Anthropocene.

Melanie Kreitler is postdoctoral researcher and MSCA fellow at Ghent University. Previously, she worked at the University of Giessen, Germany, at the Department of Anglophone Literary, Cultural, and Media Studies. Her research interests are in the intersections of cognitive and cultural approaches to film, television, and videogames, and critical approaches to empathy afforded through narrative fiction. She is the author of Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity: An Experiential Approach to Puzzle Films and Complex Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and co-editor of the volume Diversity Issues in the USA (with Greta Olson, transcript, 2024) and the special issues “Illness, Narrated” (with with Silvia Boide, Benjamin Brendel, and Maaike Hommes, On_Culture, 2021), “Queer Politics in Media and Legal Cultures” (with Laura Borchert, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2024), and “Mental TV” (with Marta Lopera-Mármol, Series, 2025).

Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège (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).

Wibke Schniedermann is a postdoctoral researcher in UGent's literary studies department. She is currently working on an FWO-funded project on time loop narratives ("Cultures of Time Loop Narratives"). She received her PhD in American Studies from Goethe University, Frankfurt for a dissertation on masculine domination in Henry James's novels. Her current project explores the connections between place and homelessness in U.S. American literature and culture. In her research and her teaching, she aims to decipher and critique the political functions of cultural and literary forms. Her other areas of interest include cultural critical mobility studies, discourses of food and eating, gender and queer theory, temporal fragmentation in narrative, affect theory, and intersectional approaches to cultural texts.

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 an FWO 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 (Bloomsbury, 2026).

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

September 2026-January 2027 | Caesy Stuck (University of Giessen)

September-October 2026 | Curtis Runstedler (University of Stuttgart)

October 2025-April 2026 | Alessia Vecchi (University of Milan and Roma Tre University)

April-May 2025 | Piotr F. Piekutowski (University of Silesia in Katowice)

January-June 2025 | Chiara Xausa (University of Bologna)

September 2024-August 2025 | Xianmin Shen (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics)

March 2024 | Selina-Marie Scholz (University of Stuttgart)

January-April 2024 | Martina Manfredi Selvaggi (Sapienza University of Rome)

July-December 2023 | Marco Tognini (University of Milan)