Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory, University of Namur, and Research Fellow, KU Leuven, Belgium

Expertise: Literary translation, translation and multilingualism, translation theory, journal editorship, English literature, literary theory, humour studies

Dirk Delabastita teaches English literature and literary theory at the University of Namur and is a research fellow at KU Leuven. His publications engage with fields such as literary translation studies, wordplay studies and the international reception of Shakespeare’s works. He is now increasingly focusing his research on literary multilingualism, with papers on ’Allo ’Allo, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Brontë, Joyce Carol Oates and Xiaolu Guo. Dirk has co-authored three dictionaries of literary terms, including Dictionnaire des termes littéraires (2005) in French and the open-access project Algemeen Letterkundig Lexicon in Dutch. His books include There’s a Double Tongue. An Investigation into the Translation of Shakespeare’s Wordplay, with special reference to ‘Hamlet’ (1993), European Shakespeares (co-edited with Lieven D’hulst, 1993), Fictionalizing Translation and Multilingualism (co-edited with Rainier Grutman, 2005), Shakespeare and European Politics (co-edited with Jozef de Vos and Paul Franssen, 2008), Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (co-edited with Ton Hoenselaars, 2015), and “Romeo and Juliet” in European Culture (co-edited with Juan F. Cerdá and Keith Gregor, 2017). From 2012 to 2019 Dirk co-edited Target. International Journal of Translation Studies.