Carmijn Gerritsen

Carmijn Gerritsen is a researcher exploring experimental modes of Black British writing and performance through the lens of mediation and cultural remembrance. She holds a Research MA in Literary Studies from Radboud University and has examined the critical affordances of memory activism, formal innovation and hypermediacy in diverse literary responses to the Grenfell Tower disaster (2017) in her thesis “Mnemonic Traces of Grenfell: Mediating Cultural Memories and Literary Experimentation in Contemporary Black British Writing”. Examining how generic efforts such as self-reflexive, documentary and multimodal approaches inflect mnemonic practices, her academic work stands at the intersection between postcolonial literary criticism, genre theory and memory studies. Her research focuses on the the tapestry of evocative ways in which authors engage with, recast and mediate discussions around race, belonging and remembrance, using manifold forms, perspectives and motifs to construe a process of witnessing. Alongside her position as editorial assistant at English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, she is currently preparing a doctoral research proposal on the mediation of experimental mnemonic repertoires and socio-political engagement in contemporary Black British literature, under the guidance of Prof. Elisabeth Bekers (VUB) and Dr Ruud van den Beuken (RU).