Eva Ulrike Pirker

Eva Ulrike Pirker joined VUB Brussels in 2023 as Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She 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 literature engaging with experiences of migration and postcolonial situations. She has a particular interest in the examination of transcultural processes in and through literary texts 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. Currently, Eva Ulrike Pirker is the principal investigator of the EU-funded project Meritocracy and Literature: Transcultural Approaches to Hegemonic Forms (MERLIT) and one of the initiators of the Faculty of Languages and Humanities’ interdisciplinary series Ties That Bind Us as part of VUB’s public programme. She is a member of the research centres/initiatives CLIC, CLIV and BIRMM.

Areas of supervision: English and Comparative Literature, especially in a transcultural perspective; poetry and poetics and theorisations of form; literary translation and adaptation.