Programme

Only for PhDArts students.

RESEARCH

As I was writing my thesis I became increasingly interested in psychoanalytic theory. I therefore chose to move to the USA after graduating from Leiden to become a graduate student at Yale University in New Haven, where I worked with scholars such as Shoshana Felman, Peter Brooks and Geoffrey Hartman – all experts on ‘literature & psychoanalysis'. At Yale, I became involved with the then emerging field of trauma studies, and I worked for the Fortunoff video library of Holocaust testimonies, and as an assistant of the Yale Genocide Studies Center. My PhD dissertation (supervisor Shoshana Felman) studied the role of trials in the process of a national ‘coming to terms’ with the past. I juxtaposed these trials with literary texts of the same period. Before returning to Leiden in September 2004, I taught courses on Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University in New York, and courses on Visual Culture, on Cinema and on Critical Theory at NYU and at the Tisch School of the Arts.

CURRICULUM VITAE

When I studied Comparative Literature at Leiden University in the 1990s, I was mainly interested in gender theory and in the relations between literature and popular culture. My MA thesis (supervisor Ernst van Alphen) was on the construction of masculinity in the 1950s American discourse on the ‘juvenile delinquent’ / ‘teenage rebel’ (i.e. James Dean, Norman Mailer, etc.).

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

At Leiden, I am very happy to be teaching courses on Intermediality ("Paragone"), Literary Theory ("Basisbegrippen") and on Gender and Sexuality. I am particularly looking forward to the 2006 MA seminar on "De Man, Derrida and Benjamin," in which we will be tackling some of the twentieth century's most challenging writings on literature.

Frans Willem Korsten (NL, 1959) is professor in Literature and Society at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in addition to working at the department of Film- and Literary Studies of Leiden University.

Since 2010, Korsten has been Director of Education of the Leiden Insitute for Cultural Disciplines in 2010. He is a member of the editorial board for Boom-The Hague Publishers, Amsterdam University Press, and the open access Journal of Dutch Literature (AUP.) In the past he has also worked for the Dutch Council for Culture as chairman for the Letters section, and is now a member of the Rotterdam Council for Culture.