Full Professor
TSHD: Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences
TSHD: Department of Culture Studies
Bio
Odile Heynders is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture Studies of Tilburg University. She was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Sciences (NIAS) in 1998/99 and 2004/05. She published numerous books and articles on European literature and authorship. Her book Writers as Public Intellectuals, Literature, Celebrity, Democracy (2016) appeared at Palgrave McMillan. Her current research (book) projects are on Experiences of Migration in Literature (book contract Cambridge Publishers) and on The Truths of Fiction in Digital Societies.
My research focuses on modern public intellectuals as figures with a certain artistic prestige and writing career, who by self-fashioning try to convince an audience, and in doing so intentionally appear on various media platforms a specific style and voice. I have a special interest in the practitioners of literary fiction, who are uniquely equipped to guide readers through a 'post-truth' world. Readers and writers of fiction have a particular power to defend both the practice and the epistemic foundations of democracy.
Bachelor Programme: Online Culture
Master track: Art & Media Studies
Honors Programme: The Societal Challenge of Migration
I collaborate with Kate Huber and a group of students in a seed money project on 'Reading Migration through an Environmental Justice Lens'.
With Julian Hanna, I work on a incentive grant project on 'Fiction as Investigation, Methodologies in Thinking about Climate Change'.