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Professor Dirk Van Hulle

Dirk van hulle
Senior Research Fellow
dirk.vanhulle@ell.ox.ac.uk

Dirk Van Hulle is Research Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET), director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp, and PI of the ERC project 'MARGINAL: Modern Authors Reading: Genesis in Authors' Libraries' (2026-2030). With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the MLA award-winning Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), series editor of the Cambridge UP series 'Elements in Beckett Studies' and co-editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett's Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), James Joyce's Work in Progress (2016), Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (Oxford UP, 2022), Write Cut Rewrite (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024, with Mark Nixon), and The Making of Samuel Beckett's Murphy (Brill De Gruyter, 2026).

I work mainly on twentieth-century writers such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. My research concentrates on the study of literary writing processes or 'genetic criticism'. As Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, my aim is to reunite the compartmentalized fields of Bibliography, Book History, Textual Criticism, Scholarly Editing and Genetic Criticism.

The digital medium is a great catalyst for this rapprochement. For instance, the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org) is a scholarly edition that reunites all of Samuel Beckett's manuscripts held in scattered collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Apart from scans, transcriptions, search and collation engines, it also includes the author's personal library, enabling users to discover the connections between Beckett's reading and his writings.

With Mark Nixon, I edit the Oxford Handbook of Samuel Beckett (Oxford UP) and The Critical Writings of Samuel Beckett (Faber and Faber). Apart from my work on scholarly editions and authors' libraries (for Cambridge UP, Bloomsbury, Michigan UP, Routledge), I am writing a monograph on genetic criticism for Oxford University Press and organizing conferences on 'Writers' Libraries', 'Creative Revision' and 'Histories of the Holograph' in March 2022.

Publications