My research looks at the relationship between technological media (film, radio, television) and more traditional literary genres (poetry, prose, theatre) in fiction from the British Isles. It combines a variety of methodologies and theoretical fields, including adaptation, sound and media studies, audio- and transmedial narratology, genetic criticism and archival research. After finishing my PhD in English Literature at the University of Antwerp in 2014, on Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a project funded by the EU’s European Research Council (ERC) entitled ‘Creative Undoing and Textual Scholarship’, which allowed me to familiarize myself with Beckett’s prose and theatre. Since then, my research has branched out into work by other authors, including James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Margaret Atwood, Andrew Sachs, Leslie Daiken and James Hanley. I have published book chapters in a range of essay collections, some of which I co-edited, and articles in journals such as Genetic Joyce Studies, The Harold Pinter Review, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies. A former editorial assistant of the journal, I am currently on its editorial board, as well as on that of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP). My contributions to the BDMP have won the Prize for a Bibliography, Archive or Digital Project from the Modern Language Association (MLA), and I have also received fellowships from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC) from the University at Texas, Austin, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington. Most recently, I was awarded a Marie Curie Sklodowska Postdoctoral Fellowship from the European Commission for a project on radiophonic intermediality in British postwar theatre.
My current postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford (funded by the AHRC as part of Prof. Dirk Van Hulle’s project ‘Editing Beckett: Towards a Bilingual Digital Genetic Edition of Samuel Beckett’s Works’) is centered on Irish author Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays. I am studying their writing, translation and production process on the basis of genetic documents (notes, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, annotated editions) and archival materials (scripts, recordings, letters), in order to understand how Beckett’s writing for television relates to his work in other media and genres. This project also aims to gear the fields of genetic criticism and bibliography towards the study of broadcast media. In addition to writing a monograph titled The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project series (jointly published by Bloomsbury and University Press Antwerp) I am in the process of making an online digital genetic edition of all the drafts for the BDMP website (www.beckettarchive.org).
Relevant publications:
Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst. ‘Shakespeare in Samuel Beckett’s Library’. The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118.3 (2024): forthcoming.
Olga Beloborodova, James Little and Pim Verhulst. ‘Beckett’s Collaborative Ecologies across Media’. Samuel Beckett and Ecology. Ed. Céline Thobois, Trish McTighe and Nicholas Johnson. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, forthcoming.
- Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Manuscripts: A Literary Archive in the Digital Age’. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives. Eds. Jamie Callison, Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen and Erik Tonning. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, pp. 23-41.
- Pim Verhulst. ‘Beckett’s “Adaphatroce” Revisited: Towards a Poetics of Adaptation’. Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, Remediation, Appropriation. Eds. Jonathan Bignell, Anna McMullan and Pim Verhulst. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, pp. 19-33.
- Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst. “Learn by heart”: Beckett’s Schoolboy Copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’, Journal of Beckett Studies 31.2 (2022): 135-150.
- Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst, eds. Beckett and Modernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘En attendant Godot’ / ‘Waiting for Godot’. London & Brussels: Bloomsbury & University Press Antwerp, 2018.
At the University of Oxford, I am currently only involved in the evaluation of term papers and dissertations, in addition to the occasional guest lecture or talk on Samuel Beckett, genetic criticism, digital humanities or textual scholarship, for example at the centenary colloquium of the Oxford Bibliographical Society and the GENESIS conference of The Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET) in 2022. My past teaching experience at the University of Antwerp includes MA courses on Irish literature, British women writers and genetic criticism, as well as BA courses on the literature, culture and history of the UK and US, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, radio drama, academic writing and research methodologies.
