Invited lectures / Public engagement

2026. Invited lecture. "Fungal Fixation and Mycelial Madness in Weird Fiction", Fungal Weird/Gothic, 23 October 2026, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Announcement and poster on UNIL's website.

2025. Panel discussion. “Kan literatuur de wereld redden?,” Ecopolis Fair(er) Futures Festival, 29 November 2025, Muntpunt, Brussels, Belgium. Panel summary at deBuren.com.

2021. Invited lecture. “The Brightness Growing Within: Area X’s Vegetal Becomings,” VUB Crosstalks, More-than-human Encounters: Radical Botany, Tendrilesque Writing, 19 October 2021, Kaaitheater, Brussels, Belgium. Full event video on YouTube.

Publications

2025. “Global Weirding.” Umwelt Wiki for Key Concepts in the (Germanic) Environmental Humanities, edited by Anna-Maria Senuysal, The Ohio State University. Read it here.

2025. “Forms and Themes of the Eco-Weird: Experimentation and Play in a Warming World.” The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Film, and Games, edited by Brian Onishi and Nathan M. Bell, Palgrave Macmillan. Read it here (paywall) or here (preprint).

2024. With Caracciolo, Marco, Kristin Ferebee, Shannon Lambert, and Heidi Toivonen. “Uncertainty and the limits of narrative: An introduction.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 185–89. Read it here (paywall).

2023. With Caracciolo, Marco, Susannah Crockford, and Shannon Lambert. “Phenomenology of everyday climate : an ethnographic approach to metaphor, affect, and the nonhuman.” ISLE-Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 353–76. Read it here.

2022. With Caracciolo, Marco, Kristin Ferebee, Shannon Lambert, and Heidi Toivonen. “Climate Fiction: A Posthumanist Survey.” Interférences Litéraires, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 6–21. Read it here.

2022. “Weird.” More Posthuman Glossary, 2nd edition, edited by Rosi Braidotti et al., Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 159–61. Read it here (preprint).

2022. With Marco Caracciolo. “The Weird and the Meta in Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts.” Configurations, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 1–23. Read it here (paywall) or here (preprint).

2021. “8 November 2015.” Dates with Gender and Diversity: Huldeboek aan Marysa Demoor, edited by Marianne Van Remoortel et al.,Skribis, pp. 260-63. Read it here (preprint).  

2021. Weird Fiction in a Warming World : A Reading Strategy for the Anthropocene. Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. Read it here.

2021. “‘Heights They Should Never Have Scaled’: Our Weird Planet.” SubStance, special issue, “Ecocriticism and Narrative Form,” edited by Casper et al., vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 14–33. Read it here.

2021. “‘Just a Surface’: Nonhuman Narration in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird.” Nonhuman Agency in the 21st Century Novel, edited by Yvonne Liebermann et al, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 277–96. Read it here (paywall) or here (preprint).

2020. With Haas, Sarah, and Alexander De Soete. “Zooming Through Covid: Fostering Safe Communities of Critical Reflection via Online Writers' Group Interaction,” Double Helix: Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing, vol. 8. Read it here.

2020. With Mahlu Mertens. “Decolonizing the Cli-Fi Corpus.” Collateral – Online Journal for Cross-Cultural Close Reading, edited by Stef Craps, no. 26. Read it here.

2019. “‘Through the eyes of Area X’: (Dis)locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality.” Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities, edited by Julius Greve and Florian Zappe, Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 129-47. Read it here (paywall) or here (preprint).

2019. “What’s Weird about Giant Flying Bears? The Weird Revisited in the Anthropocene.” Collateral – Online Journal for Cross-Cultural Close Reading, no. 15, “The Weird,” July. Read it here.

2019. “‘Age of Lovecraft’? Anthropocene Monsters in (New) Weird Narrative.” NORDLIT, no. 42, pp. 47–66. Read it here.

2017. “Brave New Weird: Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach.” Concentric, vol. 43, no. 1, edited by Ioana Luca, vol. 43, no. 1, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, pp. 71–96. Read it here.

• Reprinted in Speculative Ecologies: Plotting through the Mesh, edited by Vit Bohal and Dustin Breitling, Litteraria Pragensia, 2019, pp. 58-87.

2015. “Hobbits, Ents, and Daemons: Ecocritical Thought Embodied in the Fantastic.” Fafnir, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 7-17. Read it here.

• Reprinted in the official programme of The Lord of the Rings Musical at Newbury Theatre, 25 July - 15 October 2023.

Conference presentations / Workshops

2026. Invited participation, mycorrhizomatic workshop: "exploring ideas of environments, networks, relations, symbioses, and more with mushrooms & fungi", 12-14 November, University of Rostock, Germany. Funded by WKT Research Funds 2026.

2026. “Mushroom Ontologies and Speculative Ecologies of New Weird Fiction,” in double panel “Myconarratology.” The Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) Annual Conference, 4-6 June 2026, Aarhus, Denmark.

2026. “Weird Modes of Reading and the Limits of Climate Universality.” International Francqui Chair Closing Symposium: “Poetics in an Age of Differences,” 7 May 2026, MuntPunt Library, Brussels, Belgium.

2023. With Ahmed Shaikjee. “Fostering Collaborative Interinstitutional Infrastructure for Joint PhDs: Administration as a Facilitator, Not a Barrier.” GAPSYM16: Knowledge production, research ethics and authorship in African contexts, 13-14 November 2023, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, 2023.

2023. “The Ludic Weird.” Inaugural Symposium of the Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird, 30 September 2023, Penn State University, online.

2020. “Weirding the Narrative: New Weird Formal Experiments.” Anthropocenes. Reworking the Wound. Organized by the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, 17-20 June 2020, University of Katowice, online.

2020. “‘I Know It when I Feel It’: The Anthropocene as Weird Narrative.” The Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) Annual Conference, 5-7 March 2020. State University, Intercontinental Hotel, New Orleans, LA, USA.

2019. With Mahlu Mertens. “Decolonizing Climate Change Fiction.” Annual Conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE), 19 December 2019, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.

2019. “Parasites on Fire: Human Infection in Weird Ecohorror.” Paradise on Fire: ASLE Biennial Conference, 26-30 June 2019, University of Davis, CA, USA.

2019. “‘The tower, which was not supposed to be there’: Weird Unnarration.” The Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) Annual Conference, 29 May-1 June 2019, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain.

2019. “The Weird Tale as Anthropocene Parable.” Tales of Terror: Gothic, Horror, and Weird Short Fiction, 21-22 March 2019, University of Warwick, Coventry, England.

2018. “‘Just a Surface’: Nonhuman Narration in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird (2017).” Tracing Nonhuman Agency in Literatures in English, 15-17 November 2018, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Germany.

2018. “Chthonic Climate Fiction: Monsters from Beneath.” The Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) Annual Conference, 19-22 April 2018, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.

2017. With Caracciolo, Marco, Susannah Crockford, and Shannon Lambert. “Narrating the Mesh: Formal Solutions to Anthropocenic Challenges.” Confronting Narratives of the Anthropocene, 23-24 November 2017, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.

2016. “Monstrous Autopoiesis in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach.” The European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE): 7th Biennial Conference, 27-30 October 2016, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.