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Kris Van Heuckelom

Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Polish Studies at KU Leuven

About me

Kris Van Heuckelom has been affiliated with the research group Literary Theory and Cultural Studies since 2017 and currently teaches in various MA programs of the Faculty of Arts, both in Leuven and in Brussels (Cultural Studies, Master's in Western Literature, European Studies, Master's in Translation).

He spent his youth in the Campine region (east to Antwerp) and moved to Leuven in 1994 to study Slavic languages and cultures. After majoring in Polish literature at the University of Warsaw (1998-1999), he started working at the Faculty of Arts in the autumn of 2000, as a research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders. In the spring of 2003, he obtained – under the supervision of Prof. Zofia Klimaj-Goczołowa – his doctoral degree as the author of a PhD thesis on the ocularcentric discourse in the poetical works of the Polish Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz. One year later, the reworked (book) version of this dissertation was published in Polish by the Institute for Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Wizualność w poezji Czesława Miłosza). In 2005-2006, he moved to the US to become a H. Van Waeyenbergh of the Hoover Foundation Fellow (Belgian American Educational Foundation) at the University of Chicago and to pursue a postdoctoral research project devoted to idolatry and iconoclasm in the works of the Polish Modernist authors Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz. Right after this research stay in Chicago, in the autumn of 2006, Kris returned to Leuven and started teaching Polish language, linguistics and literature in the BA and MA programs in Slavic and Eastern European Studies. For ten years – until 2016, when both programs were closed down – he taught most of the Polish language, literature and culture classes in Leuven and was also the driving force behind the e-learning project Polish Your Polish, (Un)Polish Your Russian. A user-centered development of a multimedia lexicon for Polish/Russian/Dutch.

The literary and visual cultures of Polish Modernism and Late Modernism continue to play an important role in Kris's research and publications to date. Meanwhile, the aforementioned stay in Chicago (a city that, because of its very substantial Polish community, is sometimes jokingly referred to as "the second largest Polish city in the world", after Warsaw) also laid the foundation for another prominent line of research in his scholarly output, namely migration and mobility and the representation of these phenomena in contemporary literary and audiovisual culture. In 2019, this interest culminated in the elaborate monograph Polish Migrants in European Film 1918-2017, a book of which a – reworked and updated – Polish-language version is now being prepared. The thematic focus on migration intertwines in Kris's research with a profound interest in changing East-West relations and perceptions within Europe (before, during and after the Cold War). Witness to this, for example, the volumes Van Eeden tot heden. Literaire dwarsverbanden tussen Midden-Europa en de Lage Landen (2013) and European Cinema after the Wall. Screening East-West Mobility (2014), which he co-edited. A continuation of this line of research is the new project (in preparation) Imagining Socialist & Post-Socialist Mobilities: A Longitudinal Approach Towards Polish Road Narratives (1970-2020).

Comparative and transnational perspectives are, finally, also central to another important thread in Kris’s research agenda, namely Polish-Jewish relations before, during and after the Holocaust. In October 2020, he joined a couple of Polish, Israeli and American colleagues to establish a consortium (funded by the Rothschild Foundation) that will carry out comparative research – in three larger and three smaller language areas – into literary representations of the Holocaust after the year 2000 (abbreviated as CoHLIT-21). Many of the aforementioned themes and research interests funnily come together in what Kris – for many years now – considers to be his all-time favorite film, namely the American crime comedy The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998).

Kris is secretary of the Flemish Association for General and Comparative Literary Studies, co-editor of Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap and co-director of the Leuven research group MDRN. He is also active as a literary translator from Polish into Dutch and (co-)editoor of a number of anthologies, including work by, among others, Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, Adam Zagajewski and Ryszard Krynicki.