Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, NSYSU

Retired Professor and Other

Foreign Contract Employed Professor

I (PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania) came to National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, after an earlier stint of teaching at the University of Utrecht in my native the Netherlands. I am originally a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, with special interest in the dynamics between skepticism and belief in the period’s intellectual debate. Currently, my main focus is on the idea of utopia and how utopia, although eccentric to it, animates culture by inspiring new ways of approaching ethics and aesthetics. This has led me to a study of Roland Barthes’s lecture courses of the late 1970s. My article “An Epoch of Rest: Roland Barthes’s ‘Neutral’ and the Utopia of Weariness” appeared in Cultural Critique 80 (2012) and I am at work on further essays on Barthes. For some of my articles, see my page at academia.edu. With Steffen Hantke I edited Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers and the Global Academic Proletariat (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). I also edited Crossings: Travel, Art, Literature, Politics (Taipei: Bookman, 2001).
My survey courses in English and European literature are popular with undergraduate students, as is my challenging undergraduate seminar “The Enlightenment: Ideas and Ideals.” Graduate seminars I have been teaching include “The Eighteenth-Century British Novel,” “Aesthetics: The Beautiful and the Sublime,” “The Philosophical Dialogue,” and “The Utopian Imagination.” Many students who took one of these graduate courses went on to write their MA theses or doctoral dissertations with me.

18th-Century English Literature, Literary Theory, Aesthetics, Utopian genres of writing and thought