Birgit Van Puymbroeck

Birgit Van Puymbroeck is Associate Professor of Literature in English and Research Methodology at VUB, with a focus on modernism, transnational literary networks, and media studies including periodicals and radio.

She studied English and French Linguistics and Literature at Ghent University and Trinity College Dublin, and received her PhD in Literary Studies from Ghent University in 2012 for her dissertation on Anglo-French literary networks in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and Ghent University. In 2017, she was a visiting fellow at Queen Mary University of London and in 2020 at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She was selected as a member of the Belgian Young Academy (2018-2023) and the Young Leaders Academy of the European University EUTOPIA alliance (2021-2023).

Van Puymbroeck works on various aspects of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and culture. Her expertise includes modernism, network theory, transnational relations, periodical studies, print culture, and literary radio studies. She is the author of Modernist Literature and European Identity (Routledge 2020) and co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (with Marysa Demoor and Cedric Van Dijck), which won the 2024 Prize of the European Society for Periodical Research. In addition, her work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Review, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Biography: An International Quarterly. 

Van Puymbroeck is a former editor-in-chief of DiGeSt: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies. She is the co-founder of the 20cc research group at Ghent University and a member of the interdisciplinary 'Writing 1900' network and the ‘Global Modernisms’ network. With Inge Arteel, she currently co-directs the FWO-funded project “Broadcast Biographies: Innovations in Genre and Medium (1945-2020).” She welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD and postdoctoral researchers interested in modernist literature, transnational networks, print culture, audio literature and sound narratives.