Biography

Mahlu Mertens, originally from the Netherlands, is a PhD candidate at Ghent University. She holds degrees from the Theatre Academy Maastricht (B.A. Drama Director and B.A. Drama Teacher) and Ghent University (B.A. in Linguistics and Literature: Dutch and English and M.A. in Linguistics and Literature: English). Her research focuses on climate change literature that breaks with the dominant paradigm (dystopian, post-apocalyptic novels). She examines which strategies these deviant forms of climate literature use to overcome the problems that the gigantic, non-human scales and the complexity of climate change pose to fiction. Such works may provide alternative ways of narrating anthropogenic climate change that are more apt to represent this multi-faceted and far-reaching phenomenon. The overall aim is to provide insight into a more diverse arsenal of literary strategies for depicting climate change than those on which most critical energy has been expended so far, and thereby to enrich the toolkit of resources for effective climate change communication.

Contact

Department of Literary Studies / Room 130.029
Ghent University
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Ghent
Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)9 264 36 55
Fax: +32 (0)9 264 41 79
Email: Mahlu.Mertens@ugent.be