Please join us in congratulating Hadas Zahavi who has been awarded an MSCA postdoctoral fellowship and Anna-Lena Eick who has been awarded a FWO Senior postdoctoral fellowship. Both will be conducting their projects at CLIC over the coming years.
Hadas Zahavi, Warketing Peace (supervisor: Cedric Van Dijck), MSCA
“Peace,” this project argues, is no longer a state we inhabit but a commodity—branded, packaged, and sold by those who profit from war. Warketing Peace reveals how three iconic brands, Michelin, Kodak, and Burberry, invented by the late 1800s the ideal of a “peaceful lifestyle,” where peace was framed not as the result of justice, but of consuming leisure and tourism. With WWI, this fantasy was redirected: their products were simultaneously adapted for military use and promoted as ways to experience peace amid war. In the postwar era, three strands—romanticized peace, aestheticized war, and infrastructures of violence—merged into a single logic of consumption. This commodification has since consolidated into today’s global order, where “peaceful” nations profit from peace- images while driving militarized economies, underscoring the urgency of rethinking what it means to be at peace in the 21st century. At the crossroads of peace studies, narratology, media history, and ecopolitics, Warketing Peace undertakes a diachronic comparative reading of corporate marketing and consumer archives to pioneer a non-binary history of peace and war, offering a new model for analysing and mapping peace’s cultural economy. While Warketing Peace reconstructs the consumer history of modern peace, my MSCA collaborative strand, The Memorial for Those Who Did Not Fall in War (MNW), offers an innovative platform of interdisciplinary research, art, and pedagogy to co-create alternative, cross-border languages for a future of peace and ecological justice. Culminating in a monograph, an article, conference presentations, and three MNW events across Europe, Zahavi's MSCA fellowship at VUB, with a secondment at Columbia, extends her previous research on peace identities (PhD at Sorbonne Nouvelle, Fulbright postdoc at Princeton, and directorship of Columbia University’s Global Center for Peace Innovation), to revolutionise how we imagine and create peace in the 21st century
Anna-Lena Eick, Postdigital Poetics in Contemporary Print Fiction (supervisor: Arvi Sepp), FWO
The mediascape that has emerged “after digitalization” blurs conventional boundaries between digital and non-digital, online and offline, and the virtual and the real. As a result, what is conceptually referred to as the “postdigital” (cf. Cramer 2015; Berry/Dieter 2015) in the field of literary writing is characterized by a constitutive ambiguity. Digital technologies have become so deeply interwoven into everyday life that the boundaries between the two are increasingly dissolving, at the same time as they are being highlighted through aesthetic and narrative strategies that probe and exploit this tension.
While variants of electronic and digital literature that address postdigital ambiguity have been extensively analyzed (cf. Hayles 2008; Pressman 2017; Bell/Ensslin 2024), the specific responses of contemporary print fiction to the impact of the digital transformation of culture and society remain markedly under-explored in current scholarship. Seeking to fill this gap, this project investigates how contemporary print novels from Western Europe and North America (2015–present) engage with the postdigital mediascape through innovative formal-aesthetic reconfigurations of traditional narrative structures, and increased levels of media-reflexivity—mirroring the ambivalence at the heart of the postdigital. Mapping the emergence of what Eick terms Postdigital Poetics, this study explores how print fiction imitates or transposes digital mediality and formats, and how such narrative and intermedial strategies operate within the material and medial constraints and affordances of print fiction.
Postdigital Poetics as a narrative mode can be investigated broadly across different genres, themes, and media; this project, however, seeks to foreground one particularly salient constellation. As even a cursory overview of the literary output of recent years will show, print novels that prominently reference the digital sphere also exhibit an intensified thematic concern with questions of belonging and social relations that are characterized by an oscillation between noncommittal virtual proximity and increasing real-world loneliness. Through their non-digital engagement with the contemporary mediascape, these novels entwine medial with social connectivity. The project highlights this by examining their intermedial strategies and narrative manifestations of postdigital aesthetics (cf. Thon 2025), and the way these explore the postdigital ambiguity between the blurring and highlighting of media boundaries. In the process, the study aims to refine existing intermedial and narratological frameworks to better account for the complex response of print fiction to the conditions of the postdigital mediascape, thereby advancing methodological and theoretical approaches to studying contemporary print fiction under the auspices of the postdigital.
