Janine Hauthal

Janine Hauthal is Assistant Professor of Intermedial Studies at VUB (BOF-ZAP 2020-2025, tenure track). She studied Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen and Bristol and earned her PhD in English from the University of Giessen. Her PhD thesis analyses plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Michael Redhill and Alan Ayckbourn and won the bi-annual CDE award of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English for the best new monograph study in the field of contemporary drama and theatre in English in 2008. After working as research assistant at the universities of Giessen and Wuppertal, she obtained a junior and senior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at VUB, focussing on “Britain in Europe: The Emergence of Transnational Discourses in Contemporary British Literature” (2014-2017) and “Europe in the Anglophone Settler Imagination after 1989” (2017-2020) respectively. She combined her postdoctoral fellowships with a part-time, temporary research professorship in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at VUB (2016-2020).

Her research focusses on self-reflexivity across media and genres (metadrama, metatheatre, metafiction), British drama since the 1990s, European postdramatic theatre, British and Anglophone ‘fictions of Europe’, contemporary (Black) British writing, and cultural, transgeneric and intermedial narratology. Her publications include her monograph Metadrama und Theatralität: Gattungs- und Medienreflexion in zeitgenössischen englischen Theatertexten (2009) as well as the edited collections Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien: Theoretische Grundlagen – Historische Perspektiven – Metagattungen – Funktionen (with Julijana Nadj, Ansgar Nünning and Henning Peters, 2007) and Kulturwissenschaften exemplarisch: Gießener Forschungsbeiträge zu acht Kernkonzepten (with Martin Zierold and Horst Carl, 2011). Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Modern Drama, Journal for Postcolonial Writing, English Text Construction and Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik as well as with Brill, De Gruyter, and Routledge. Her most recent FWO-funded junior research project is entitled “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women’s Literature” (2021–2024).

At VUB, she is affiliated with the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) whose (vice) chair she became in 2018/2019. She is a member of several interdisciplinary and/or interuniversity research groups, including SEL – Studiecentrum Experimentele Literatuur (VUB & UGent), THALIA – Interplay of Theater, Literature & Media in Performance (VUB & UGent), the FWO-funded Scientific Research Group “Literatures without Borders. A Historical-Comparative Study of Premodern Literary Transnationality”, hosted by RELICs (UGent), and BCUS – the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies (VUB).

Since 2016, she is founding co-editor of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossing (JLIC).