Biography

Zoë Ghyselinck is a Postdoctoral Researcher (BOF, Ghent University) and Senior Humboldt Fellow (University of Regensburg, Germany) working on modern and contemporary representations of communicating with the dead, mediation and the development of communication technology. She is currently preparing a project on anticipatory mourning and the posthumous impact of end-of-life narratives, conceived in palliative care by terminally ill parents and grandparents.

Zoë obtained her PhD in the Department of Literary Studies on the reception of Greek tragedy and the philosophical concept of the tragic in early-twentieth-century German neoclassical literature. Her first monograph, Form und Formauflösung der Tragödie: Die Poetik des Tragischen und der Tragödie als religiöses Erneuerungsmuster in den Schriften Paul Ernsts (1866–1933) was published with De Gruyter in 2015. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the classical and cultural studies departments of the Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands) and was a Junior Postdoctoral Researcher of the Flanders Research Foundation (2016-2020) at Ghent University. She is currently co-editing the volume Necrodialogues and Media: Communicating with the Dead in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries in the series Media and Cultural Memory (with Dr. Elena Fabietti. De Gruyter, 2022) and preparing her second monograph (under contract with Routledge, 2023): Communicating with the Dead in Contemporary Western Literature: Spiritual Mediums and Technical Media. In 2022, she was elected as a new member of the Young Academy, Belgium.

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