From October until December 2018, Gertjan Willems will be a visiting scholar at Stijn Reijnders’s Worlds of Imagination project at Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. Willems’s research stay is supported by a ‘Grant for a long stay at an ERC Grantee abroad’ from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), aimed at preparing an ERC Starting Grant application while being part of the excellent research environment of a current ERC Grantee.
Gertjan Willems is part time assistant professor at the University of Antwerp (Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center), postdoctoral fellow of the FWO at Ghent University (Centre for Cinema and Media Studies) and guest professor at the Saint-Louis University, Brussels. He is the chair of the Film Studies section of ECREA. Willems has particular research expertise in the cinema of the Low Countries, film policy, remakes and the relation between media and nation-building.
Willems’s research stay at the Erasmus University Rotterdam will form an essential part of the preparation of his ERC Starting Grant application, which will focus on the evolving relation (1945-present) between films and national and transnational discourses in Europe. His motivation to choose the Worlds of Imagination project as host research group is based on the various research affinities of the project with his own ERC project proposal. Next to the obvious shared focus on film, the projects share an interest in the wider question on the relation between society and films and how media play an important role in the constructions of worldviews and in the construction of a sense of (sub/trans)national belonging. In terms of research set-up, the Worlds of Imagination triple focus on visual traditions, film tourism policies and the motivations and experiences of film tourists matches almost exactly with the three big work packages of Willems’s project proposal, focusing on film textual discourses, official (film policy) discourses, and audience discourses.