About
Bas is a writer, teacher and scholar of contemporary culture. Most recently he finished his stroke memoir, Right in the Head, a genre-bending book exploring the relationship between human beings and their brains.
During the day, Bas works as Professor of English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton, where he leads a Computational Literary Studies project on inclusivity and diversity, the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon. For this project, over 10,000 contemporary novels have been rated by the public in the Big Book Review. His research for BBC’s engagement project, Novel That Shaped Our World is included in the BBC podcast series Turn Up for the Books. His research often features on the BBC: he has written, for instance, about the need to rethink literary genre, fake news during the Corona crisis, and gendered responses to the pandemic.
At Wolverhampton, he is Director of the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research and works with 6 PhD students. His interest in how fake news led to the influencing of the pandemic resulted in The Rhetoric of Untruth (TRUTH). Together with Dr Dominic Dean (Sussex) he is editing a volume for English Studies on the representation of international crises in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Bas has published over ten academic books and edits a series on contemporary fiction for Bloomsbury Academic, Contemporary Critical Perspectives. He is fascinated by the ways in which human behaviour, memory and thinking are changing in the twenty-first century. He leads The Memory Network, edited the ground-breaking book Memory in the Twenty-First Century and has written on information overload. His next academic book is The Prosthetic God: Transactive Cognition in the Age of Connectivity, co-written with Dr Nick Lavery, and he is preparing a collection of essays on the way in which Japanese attitudes to the imagination can help us navigate the changing relationship between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ in the digital age. His academic profile can be found here.
Bas has written fiction and non-fiction in Dutch and English, including a book on literature in the age of globalisation, McLiteratuur (2004) and an exploration of olfaction, memory and literature in the Black Country. He has published flash fiction ‘The Soho Nocturnes’, a psychogeography of ‘The Elephant and Castle’ and a short story about the refugee crisis, ‘Twig’. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Flemish literary magazine DWB for which he edits volumes, such as, Rhine Thirst, a critical re-evaluation of the Rhine in the European consciousness.
He is working on a novel set in Los Angeles during the Rodney King Riots, entitled WaarLAnd. With photographer Tessa Posthuma de Boer he is working on a book that re-traces antique travel guides to the Netherlands, A Wanderer in Holland Revisited. In his spare time, Bas plays guitar and sings in VEK7ORS.
Bas works from London, Amsterdam and the Wolverhampton.
