Dr. Barnita BagchiBarnita Bagchi is Chair and Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on utopia, histories of transnational and women’s education, and women’s writing in western Europe and south Asia. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Utopian Studies, Religion and Society, Paedagogica Historica, New Cinemas, and Women’s History Review, and she has published numerous chapters in edited volumes. Her book-length publications include Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors: Narratives of Female Education by Five British Women Writers, 1778-1814 (2004), a part-translation with introduction, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2005; renewed edition, 2022), and the edited volumes, The Politics of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered (2012), and Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights, and Speculation (2020).
Prof. Dr. Elleke Boehmer
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Oxford, UK. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. She is a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is the author of
Postcolonial Poetics (2018); I
ndian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016); Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023);
Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002); Stories of Women (2005); and the field-defining
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005).
Southern Imagining, a literary history of the Southern Hemisphere, her seventh monograph, will appear from Princeton University Press in 2025.
Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere, co-edited with Katherine Collins, appeared in 2024. Boehmer’s fiction includes
To the Volcano, and other stories (2019; commended for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize), which is her second collection of short stories, and
The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize 2018). Her novel
Ice Shock is forthcoming. Her work has been widely translated. In 2024 she held an International Visiting Fellowship award at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
Dr. Chiara Bonfiglioli
Chiara Bonfiglioli is Associate Professor in Contemporary History in the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project titled WO-NAM: Women and Non-Alignment in the Cold War era: biographical and intersectional perspectives (2023-2028). Previously (2017-2023), she lectured in Gender & Women’s Studies at University College Cork, where she coordinated the one-year interdisciplinary Masters in Women’s Studies. She is the author of the monograph
Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector (2019), and of several publications on transnational women’s, gender and feminist history.
Dr. Michela Borzaga
Michela Borzaga is Assistant Professor in the Comparative Literature Department at Utrecht University. She teaches postcolonial theories and cultural memory courses both at BA and (R)MA levels. She studied in Salzburg, Belfast and Stellenbosch and obtained her PhD at the University of Vienna. Her research spans memory and trauma studies from a postcolonial perspective. Currently, she is editing a special issue on “Reading Coetzee’s Letters” and she is working on a project that investigates the constraints of the institution of motherhood and aesthetic challenges involved in the representation of mothers in Western and postcolonial literature. Together with Flore Janssen she is interested in exploring women activists and writings that aim at reconceiving the nuclear family across class and space. Her publications include the co-edited volumes: Imagination in a Troubled Space: A Poetry Reader (Poetry Salzburg), Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews (Rodopi/Brill, 2009), Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel (Rodopi/Brill 2012).
Prof. dr. Rosemarie Buikema
Rosemarie Buikema is professor emerita of Art, Culture and Diversity, Utrecht University. She is the scientific director of the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University and of FP6 Marie Curie EST Gendergraduates as well as the Utrecht coordinator of GEMMA, the Erasmus Mundus joint degree in Gender and Women’s Studies in Europe. She is also the Utrecht University regional ambassador for South Africa. She worked as a visiting professor at the University of Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and the Charles University in Prague. Her publications are on the interface of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Gender Studies. She published in
European Journal of Women’s studies,
Journal of Genderstudies,
Women’s Studies International Forum,
European Journal of English Studies among others.
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Dr. Laura Candidatu
Laura Candidatu is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University. She is affiliated with the Graduate Gender Program, where she coordinates the two BA Minors in Gender and Postcolonial Studies. Her areas of expertise include gender and diaspora, media and migration, and digital ethnography.
She has published research on feminist methodological approaches to digital media, digital diaspora, and the role of motherhood in migration and diasporic processes. Her current research interests focus on the relationship between borders, and Eastern European labor migration, and social reproduction theory, as well as the material turn in digital media studies.
Dr. Gianmaria Colpani
Gianmaria Colpani is Assistant Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. He teaches feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories at BA and (R)MA levels. He obtained his PhD in Gender Studies and Political Philosophy at the University of Verona and Utrecht University. His research interests include queer Marxism and queer of color critique, queer archives and LGBTQ+ history, Marxist and post-Marxist theories of hegemony, postcolonial critique, and intersectionality. He has published in English and Italian on the work of Stuart Hall, postcolonial/decolonial debates, postcolonial sexual politics in Europe, and the archives of the gay and lesbian left.
Prof. Stef Craps
Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University in Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research spans memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Among his publications in these fields are the co-authored volume
Trauma (Routledge, 2020), the monographs
Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and
Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), and the co-edited essay collection
Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). Currently, he is working on a study of ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process.
Prof. Paulo de Medeiros
Paulo de Medeiros is Head of the English & Comparative Literary Studies Department and Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literature at Warwick University (UK). From 1998 to 2013 he was Professor and Chair of Portuguese Studies at Utrecht University and was co-founder of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative with Sandra Ponzanesi. He has taught at several universities in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brasil, Spain, and the USA. In 2011-2012 he held the Keeley Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford. His research centers on Critical Theory, World-Literature, Luso-Brazilian narrative and film, lwith a focus on the interrelations between politics and literature. He has edited
Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literature (Utrecht, 2007) and more recently, with Sandra Ponzanesi,
Postcolonial Theory and Crisis (Berlin and New York, 2024).
Dr. Julie Fraser
Julie Fraser works at The Netherlands Institute of Human Rights in the School of Law at UU. She teaches various courses at the bachelor and master level and takes a critical approach in her work often drawing from scholars in the Global South. Together with colleagues she runs a decolonisation reading group in the LLM on Public International Law. Her current research focuses on human rights and the environment, as well as the relationship between Islamic and international law. As part of this research, Julie undertook field work in Indonesia and Kenya. She is on the Board of the Leiden Journal of International Law and international board of The Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights.
Dr. Magdalena Górska
Magdalena Górska is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies, and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her research focuses on the feminist politics of breathing and vulnerability, exploring how we are all co-respirators, while acknowledging that we do not breathe on equal terms due to social and environmental inequalities. Her book
Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (2016) develops a feminist engagement with breath and breathing, offering a non-universalizing and politicized understanding of embodiment, whe1re human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors in intersectional politics. She founded the
Breathing Matters Network and co-edits the
Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing book series. She is a co-editor (with Milica Trakilović) of
Social and Political Suffocations volume (Routledge, forthcoming 2025) and co-editor in chief (with Lenart Škof) of
Handbook of Critical Respiratory Studies: Breath and Air in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Springer, forthcoming 2025/26). Currently, she is working on her new project
RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times (funded by the European Research Council).
Dr. Adriano José Habed
Adriano José Habed is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, NL. From 2018 to 2022, he conducted his Ph.D research on queer critique and its discontents at the University of Verona, IT, and Utrecht University, NL. His publications include
The author, the text, and the (post)critic: notes on the encounter between postcritique and postcolonial criticism (Postcolonial Studies 24:4, 2021) and
Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics (co-edited with S. Ponzanesi, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Graham Huggan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds. His research over a thirty-plus-year year career has straddled three fields: postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and tourism studies, all of which are combined in his 2018 monograph
The Cetacean Quartet: Colonialism, Culture, Whales. His most recent book is the co-authored
Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2020: Land Lines (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Recent and/or ongoing projects include setting up and co-directing a cross-disciplinary doctoral training program in extinction studies, and co-leading an international research project on European national parks.
Prof. dr. Birgit M. Kaiser
Birgit Mara Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She studied sociology and literature in Bochum, Bielefeld, Madrid and London, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. Her research spans literatures in English, French and German from the late 18 to the 21 century, with special interest in aisthesis/aesthetics, corporeality and subject-formation. She works on postcolonial literatures (esp. French North-African and Caribbean) and critiques of colonial modernity, as well as feminist new materialism. Her books include
Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY 2011),
Singularity and Transnational Poetics (Routledge 2015), S
ymptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (Meson Press 2017, with K. Thiele and M. Bunz). Recent publications also appeared in
Comparative Literature,
Interventions,
Parallax,
Textual Practice and
PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. With K. Thiele, she is founding coordinator of
Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities and editor of the book series
New Critical Humanities with Rowman & Littlefield International.
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Dr. Susanne Knittel
Susanne C. Knittel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research centers on the question of how societies remember atrocities — specifically how they deal with the uncomfortable issues of guilt and responsibility — and what role literature, art, film, and other cultural representations play in this process. She is the founder of the
Perpetrator Studies Network, editor-in-chief of
JPR: The Journal of Perpetrator Research, and director of the
Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies. She leads the ERC-funded project
Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination, which explores how cultural representations can make visible the deep historical roots that tie eco-violence to other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide, and how culture reflects on questions of responsibility. Susanne is the author of The
Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham University Press, 2015) and the co-editor, with Kári Driscoll, of “Memory after Humanism,” Special Issue of
Parallax 23.4 (2017). Together with Zachary J. Goldberg, she edited
The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies; and, with Astrid Erll and Jenny Wüstenberg,
Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization: Doing Memory Studies with Ann Rigney (De Gruyter, 2024).
Dr. Koen Leurs
Dr. Koen Leurs is an Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research interests include migration, borders, and youth culture; feminist research ethics and digital, creative and participatory methodologies. He co-edited the
Handbook of Media and Migration (Sage, 2020),
Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and Practices of the Everyday (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and special issues
(Im)mobile entanglements (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2023) and
Inclusive media education for diverse societies (Media & Communication, 2022). His monographs are
Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0 (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) and
Digital Migration (Sage, 2023). Leurs is interested in postcolonial approaches to migration and digital technology, to draw attention to the historical genealogies that underpin processes of categorization, control and surveillance, as well as historical antecedents to contestation, negotiation and experiences ‘from below’.
Dr. Sabrina Marchetti
Sabrina Marchetti is Associate Professor in Sociology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is mainly specialised on issues of gender, racism, labour and migration, with a specific focus on the question of migrant domestic and care work. She has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute and holds a PhD from Utrecht University. She has been post-doctoral fellow at the Gender Excellence Programme of Linköping University in Sweden. She led the ERC-funded DomEQUAL project (2016–21) on domestic workers' labor rights and coordinated research for VULNER (2020–23). Currently, she leads the Italian team for the Horizon Europe project I-CLAIM (2023–26). Her books in English are 'Black Girls. Migrant Domestic Workers and Colonial Legacies' (Brill, 2014), 'Employers, Agencies and Immigration: Paying for Care' (Ashgate 2015, with Anna Triandafyllidou), 'Global domestic workers: intersectional inequalities and struggles for rights' (Bristol UP 2021, with Giulia Garofalo Geymonat and Daniela Cherubini) and more recently 'Migration and domestic work' (Springer, 2022). For her full list of publications
click here.
Dr. Jamila Mascat
Jamila M. H. Mascat is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme and a research affiliate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (
ICON) at Utrecht University. Jamila teaches a variety of courses in Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Race Studies. Her transdisciplinary research works across the fields of Political Philosophy (German Idealism and Marxism in particular), Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Theories, and Critical Race Theories. Her current research interests focus, on the one hand, on theories of partisanship and political engagement and, on the other hand, on theories of postcolonial justice and postcolonial reparations.
Dr. Aminata Cécile Mbaye
Aminata Cécile Mbaye is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University, Graduate Gender Programme.
Trained in a transdisciplinary manner in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and literary studies, Aminata Cécile Mbaye’s scholarship and teaching reside at the nexus of critical gender/queer studies, critical race studies, African and Black feminism, as well as post- and decolonial theories. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis and ethnographic research involving Senegalese activists, filmmakers, writers, and religious authorities, Aminata’s first monograph
Les discours sur l’homosexualité au Sénégal. L'analyse d’une lute représentationnelle (2018) scrutinises the emergence of new postcolonial representations, discourses, and practices concerning sexuality and same-sex intimacy in Senegal. In 2021, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation for the project
Afroqueer Assemblages: An Aesthetic of Resistance in 'Real' and 'Virtual' Worlds. Recently, Aminata has started research exploring the intersection of gender, health, and environmental pollution in Martinique and Guadeloupe.
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Prof. John McLeod
John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. He works across the fields of postcolonial literary studies and critical adoption studies, and is the author of
Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester UP, 2000/2010),
Postcolonial London: Writing the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), J. G. Farrell (Northcote House, 2007),
Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and
Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture (Liverpool UP). He has co-edited special issues of
Études anglaises,
Moving Worlds, and
Wasafiri on postcolonial concerns, and published in journals such as
ARIEL,
Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
Paragraph,
Adoption & Culture, and
Literature, Critique, and Empire Today.
Ana Cristina Mendes is a Professor of English Studies at the University of Lisbon and Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies (2022–26). She applies cultural and postcolonial theory to literary and screen texts, focusing on epistemic injustice and resistant knowledge formations. Her research spans contemporary screen media, Indian writing in English, Shakespearean adaptation in India, and Victorian cultural afterlives. Her latest book,
Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery (2023), examines curriculum decolonization. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, Jadavpur University, and Hyderabad University.
Dr. Eva Midden
Eva Midden is Associate Professor in Gender Studies, at the Media and Culture Studies Department of Utrecht University. Midden is a member of the core team of the IOS Platform Gender, Diversity and Global Justice, at Utrecht University and is senior researcher in the Horizon Project RE-WIRING (on girls' and women's inclusion, representation and empowerment). She is also a board member of the international organization for Gender Studies research RINGS. Her general research interests include feminist theory, intersectionality, (post)secular(ism), nationalism, whiteness and media analysis. Midden's current research focuses on gender, love and (non-)monogamy. She is working on a book about women and (in)fidelity.
Liesbeth Minnaard is a lecturer in Film and Literary Studies at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Her research focuses on the cultural effects of migration, on intersections of race, gender and more, on the rhetoric of (Europe in) crisis, and on literature and activism. She is the author of
New Germans, New Dutch. Literary Interventions (Amsterdam University Press, 2007), co-author of
De lichtheid van literatuur. Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (Acco, 2015) and co-editor of, o.a.,
Literature, Language and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (Rodopi, 2013),
Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism (Brill, 2014), and
From Crisis to Critique: Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes (2020). She is co-organizer of the Flemish-Dutch Platform for Postcolonial Readings and a board member of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies.
Dr. Ana Miranda Mora
I am an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme. My research focuses on the intersection of political and legal philosophy, Critical Theory, and 20th and 21st Century Feminist Theory. I also have longstanding interests and expertise in (Post)Marxism, German Classical Philosophy, Decolonial and Postcolonial Theory, Affect Theory, and Queer and Gender Studies. My main research topics include domestic and care work, gender-based and sexual violence, anti-feminist and anti-gender movements, the feminist theory of affects and emotions, the intersection of feminism and Marxism, feminist political activism, contemporary critiques of law and punitive justice, political and colonial violence, and theories of power and the state.
Dr. Domitilla (Domi) Olivieri
I am an anthropologist, activist, teacher, and researcher and I work as assistant professor at the Graduate Gender programme, in the Media and Culture Studies department, at Utrecht University.
My academic publications include: “In the Spiral of Time. Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha” for Transnational Screens (2022); “Slowness as a mode of attention and resistance: playing with time in documentary cinema and contesting the rhythms of the neoliberal university” in Contention (2022); and a special issue of Feminist Media Studies entitled “Affective Encounters: Tools of Interruption for Activist Media Practices” (2017).
I work across the fields of gender studies, feminist and postcolonial studies, critical theory, visual studies, sensory anthropology and media and popular culture. My research focuses on documentary practices, time and spaces of the everyday, forms of social and political relationality and contestation, activist interventions in neoliberal academia, and rhythm in (documentary) media.
Dr. Elizabeth Amarukhor Omoruyi
Elizabeth Amarukhor Omoruyi holds a PhD from the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University. She is a lecturer at International Business School the Hague (IBSH), and an adjunct lecturer in Centre for Gender, Humanitarian and Development Studies Redeemers University. Her areas of interest include but are not limited to African women literature, Intersectionality, Cultural studies and women to women oppression. Some of her recent publications include: Women Oppressing Women - An Intersectional Reading of women Authors in Nigeria (2025), Womenpressionism and the Reading of Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl (2024). She has attended international conferences in Nigeria and the Netherlands and currently serves as editor of Ede: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Dr. CQ Quinan
CQ Quinan is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies and Director of the Gender Studies program at the University of Melbourne. They publish widely in the fields of trans studies, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, and their work examines how social and cultural anxieties – particularly those around migration, nationality, and racial difference – come to be transposed onto queer and trans bodies and subjectivities. Their first book is entitled Hybrid Anxieties: Queering the French-Algerian War and its Postcolonial Legacies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), and their second monograph, entitled Paradoxes of Trans Subjectivity: Recognition, Representation, Resistance, is in progress. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, they held appointments at Utrecht University and at UC Berkeley.
Professor Eliza Steinbock (they/them) is Chair in Transgender Studies, Art and Cultural Activism at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Steinbock is a multidisciplinary scholar whose dynamic array of research and social initiatives coalesce around interventions that challenge and disrupt mechanisms of exclusion and instead foster inclusion in the domains of art, culture, media, and heritage. They facilitate connections and knowledge mobilization to the public as Director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity (CGD). Steinbock has a prolific and impactful publication record of over 40 articles and book chapters, as well as the award-winning book S
himmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke University Press, 2019). They are co-editor of
Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020) and co-edit the book series in critical trans studies,
ASTERISK: Gender, Trans-, and
All That Comes After, for Duke Press. Their most recent edited volume is in Dutch and English,
The Critical Visitor: Changing Heritage Practices || De kritische bezoeker: erfgoedpraktijken in verandering (2023) (
download it here).
https://elizasteinbock.com/ 
Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is also co-founder and director of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI). She has published widely in the field of media, postcolonial studies, digital migration and cinema, with a particular focus on Postcolonial Europe from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. 
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