PhD Position in Literary Studies

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PhD Position in Literary Studies / Translation Studies: Pluriactive Literary Labor and the Infrastructures of World Literature

KU Leuven is an autonomous university. It was founded in 1425. It was born of and has grown within the Catholic tradition.

The research groups Translation & Intercultural Transfer and English Literature of the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven (campuses Antwerp and Leuven) are looking for a PhD candidate to execute a four-year research project on the different roles that emerging literary artists (writers, translators, literary professionals) in Europe adopt as they make their way into the literary field. This doctoral project is one of three belonging to a large-scale research program that studies pluriactivity, digitality, and mobility as key features of the way world literature functions now.

KU Leuven is a leading research hub in the transnational study of literature and translation. It offers an exciting environment for young scholars to pursue their research in an independent way alongside the benefits of a genuinely collaborative mode of working. While this particular doctoral project is based at the university’s Antwerp campus, it is undertaken in close collaboration with researchers and supervisors based in both Antwerp and Leuven. Both cities are close to Brussels, and less than two hours from Paris, London, and Amsterdam.

Project

‘Pluriactive Literary Labor and the Infrastructures of World Literature’ is part of an encompassing research program ‘EMLIT: Pluriactivity, Digitality, Mobility, and the Emergence of World Literature.’ Funded by the KU Leuven Research Council and supervised by Núria Codina Solà, Jack McMartin, and Pieter Vermeulen, the program aims to understand how world literature is increasingly made in unstable conditions marked by pluriactive cultural labor, digital mediation, and changing mobility regimes. Theorizing contemporary world literature as a process of permanent and never fully stable emergence, EMLIT aims to generate innovative and empirically grounded insights into the aesthetic, lived, and institutional realities of contemporary world literature and its agents. Combining textual analysis with sociological and ethnographic methods, EMLIT aims to set a new theoretical and analytical standard for an inductive approach to world literature, to gather empirical data about the lived reality of literary emergence,, and to examine the main aesthetic forms this emergence takes.

The project ‘Pluriactive Literary Labor and the Infrastructures of World Literature’ investigates pluriactivity (fragmented labor arrangements across multiple professional roles and institutions) as a constitutive condition of contemporary literary activity. It examines how literary artists at work in Europe assemble viable careers through crossovers between adjacent roles, and how these shape access to resources, networks of mediation, and the production of literary value. It applies this focus in an in-depth case study of the Connecting Emerging Literary Artists (CELA) network, which links writers and translators across 11 European countries and connects 165 “emerging” literary artists through mentorship, workshops, co-creation, and circulation-focused programming. The project will map the range of pluriactive roles and career configurations found in the network through an exhaustive survey administered to the 165 CELA participants, a role-mapping and profile typology, focus group discussions, interviews, and paired text/context analyses.

The successful candidate will undertake the following tasks:

• Complete a doctoral dissertation on CELA’s role in shaping literary caree