Eva Ulrike Pirker

Eva Ulrike Pirker has joined VUB Brussels in 2023 as Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She has previously taught at the University of Düsseldorf (2017-2023) and the University of Freiburg (2003-2016), where, after studying New English Literatures, American Studies and Philosophy in Tübingen and San Diego, she obtained her doctorate in English Philology. Her main areas of expertise are in the field of Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures and her particular interest is in the examination of transcultural processes in and through literature and other art forms. These fields of inquiry are inevitably characterised by translational processes. Eva Ulrike Pirker is also interested in translation as a practice and the tensions arising from artistic claims to autonomy on the one hand and the confrontation with alterity on the other – a tension which manifests itself in diverse aspects of translation processes. Eventually, much of her research circles back to the question of how the world and literary and artistic forms relate to each other.

Her published research in the field of BBWW includes work on the writers Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Charlotte Williams, Jackie Kay, Bernadine Evaristo and Sharon Dodua Otoo, the painter Lubaina Himid, photographers Ingrid Pollard and Suki Dhanda.