Rate My Professor Dirk Van Hulle

Dirk Van Hulle is a full research professor of Literature in English in the Department of Literature at the University of Antwerp, where he serves as director of the Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism and the Centre for Manuscript Genetics. He earned his PhD from the University of Antwerp in 1999 with the thesis 'Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann'. His academic career at the University of Antwerp began as a research assistant from 1996 to 2000, followed by doctor-assistant from 2000 to 2004, lecturer from 2004 to 2007, associate professor from 2008 to 2011, professor from 2012 to 2015, and full professor since 2016. He also holds the position of Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford, where he is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory.

Van Hulle's expertise encompasses genetic criticism, textual scholarship, modern manuscripts, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce. He co-directs the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which received the Modern Language Association's Prize for a Bibliography, Archive, or Digital Project in 2019. He has obtained significant funding, including an ERC Starting Grant in 2012 for 'Creative Undoing and Textual Scholarship: A Rapprochement between Genetic Criticism and Scholarly Editing' (CUTS) and an ERC Advanced Grant for 'Modernist Authors' Reading: Genesis in Authors' Libraries' (MARGINAL, 2026-2030). Notable publications include 'Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature' (Oxford University Press, 2022), 'Samuel Beckett's Library' (Cambridge University Press, 2013, with Mark Nixon, 263 citations), 'Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond' (2014, 152 citations), 'Textual Awareness' (2004, 126 citations), and 'The Making of Samuel Beckett's Murphy' (Brill De Gruyter, 2026). He is co-editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, series editor for Cambridge University Press's 'Elements in Beckett Studies', and former president of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. Van Hulle teaches courses such as 'Writers at Work: Textual Genetics and Text Editing', 'Beckett Seminar', and 'Text as Data' in Master of Linguistics and Literature programs.