Isabel Hoving is Senior University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Isabel Hoving

Research

If my research concerns interculturality, globalization, gender, sexuality, and nature, it is because I am interested in all manifestations of cultural diversity. I obtained my PhD at Amsterdam University in 1995 with a dissertation on the multi-voiced literatures Caribbean migrant women (cum laude; supervisor Mieke Bal). My work aims at relating critically to postcolonial literary theory and the theories of migration and globalization, by confronting and mixing these theories with other theories, and testing them in new contexts. For example, I am translating postcolonial (and related critical) insights to the Dutch situation (see e.g. my publications on Surinamese literature (2004), the influence of migration on Dutch everyday culture (2005), and (forthcoming) Dutch racism). My most recent work inquires into the baffling intersections of postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and queer theory. I became interested in ecocriticism (which researches the literary imagination of nature), when my research in issues of postcoloniality and interculturality showed me that, at the heart of the intertwined discourses of race and sexuality, we find strong convictions of what would be natural, and what unnatural. A final topic that fascinates me is cross-over literature; as a writer (of cross-over philosophical fantasy), I like to ponder the tensions between the theory and the practice of literature.

Curriculum Vitae

I began my working life as a secondary school teacher (1978). After working at the Universities of Amsterdam and Antwerp, I had the fortune to join the Department of Literary Studies in Leiden, where I am now in particular responsible for courses in interculturality, and gender and sexuality. Having been a teacher for more than thirty years, I still love teaching, particularly when it concerns literature: I love story-telling so much that I cannot help but publish novels myself (2002, 2009, 2010). I am also a member of the editorial team of Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, sex and race, and Ecozon@, Journal for European Literature, Culture and Environment.

Publications

Between Relation and the Bare Facts: the Migratory Imagination and Relationality. In Durrant, S. & Lord, C.M. (Eds.) Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-making (pp. 179-190). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Moving the Caribbean Landscape: Cereus Blooms At Night as a Re-imagination of the Caribbean Environment. In: DeLoughrey, E.M., Gosson, R.K., Handley, G.M. (Eds.), Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (New World Studies), pp. 154-168. Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Hoving, I. & Dibbits, H. & Schrover, Marlou (Eds.) (2005) . Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 2005.

Niets dan het heden: over Jamaica Kincaid, de postkoloniale literatuurstudie, en wat er van ons terecht moet komen. In Kempen, M., van, Verkruijsse, P., Zuiderweg, A. (Eds.) Wandelaar onder de palmen (pp. 15-27). Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2004.

Oude pijn en nieuwe moed: familie, politiek en geweld door de ogen van een nieuwe generatie Surinaamse schrijfsters. OSO Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde, Cultuur en Geschiedenis, 23 (2004) 1, pp. 98-109.

With Kathleen Gyssels andMaggie Bowers, ed. Convergences and Interferences: Newness in Intercultural Practices. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001

In Praise of New Travellers. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2001. 

Publications

Activities