Birger Vanwesenbeeck, associate professor of English, was appointed editor of the “Fictions Present” thread of the Electronic Book Review (EBR) in November. Now in its 18th year, EBR is a pioneering open access scholarly journal of critical writing about both print and born-digital literature, theory and the arts.
According to the home site of the thread, Dr. Vanwesenbeeck’s “Fictions Present” gathers essays, narratives and essay-narratives that “reaffirm the ‘presentist’ bias in electronic publishing and in EBR particularly.” The thread “is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions.”
In addition to his involvement with EBR, Vanwesenbeeck is also a founding board member of the open access journal Orbit: Writing about Pynchon, and he is a peer reviewer for the scholarly journal Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. His essays on contemporary literature have appeared in leading international journals including Mosaic, Postmodern Culture and Pynchon Notes. Moreover, he is also the co-editor of a book on the American author William Gaddis, whose experimental writing style, according to Vanwesenbeeck, “has often been said to anticipate such contemporary media discourses as hypertext and Twitter.”
Vanwesenbeeck has been involved with EBR since 2012, when he wrote his first book review for the journal at the request of its editor in chief. His most recent contribution to EBR is “I read because it is absurd,”.
