People

Director

Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi

Sandra Ponzanesi is Chair and Full professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She was Visiting Professor at Columbia University and UCLA,  Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE, visiting scholar at New York University, the University of California, Riverside and Rutgers University. Her research interests include: transnational feminist theories, postcolonial critique, comparative literature, european migration studies, (new)media studies and postcolonial cinema. She has been awarded a ERC consolidator grant on 'Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging', 2016-2021. She was project leader of the High Potential Program: 'Wired up. Digital media as innovative socialization practices for migrant youth' and Utrecht coordinator of the EU 7th framework project 'Mig@net: Transnational Digital Network, Migration and Gender.' She is also principal investigator of the NWO funded project PIN (Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics, https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/ig18014), and previosuly PEN (Postcolonial Europe Network: www.postcolonialeurope.eu). Among her publications are: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture (Suny, 2004); Migrant Cartographies (Lexingtonbooks, 2005) with Daniela Merolla; Deconstructing Europe (Routledge, 2011) with Bolette Blaagaard; Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge 2011) with Marguerite Waller,  The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (Palgrave, 2014), Gender, Globalization and Violence. Postcolonial Conflict Zones (Routledge, 2014), Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe (Rowman and Littlefield International 2018) with Adriano Josè Habed,  Postcolonial Transitions in Europe. Context, Practices and Politics, with Gianmaria Colpani (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016). She has also guest edited several special issues, among others 'Postcolonial Intellectual Engagements. Critics, Artists and Activists,' Postcolonial Studies, 24(4), 2021; Somali Diaspora and Digital Practices', Journal of Global Diaspora and Media, 2(1), 2021; Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age' for Television and New Media, 20(6), 2019; 'Migrancy, Digital Media and Emotion,' for The International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(3), 2020; 'Digital Crossings in Europe' with Koen Leurs for the journal Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 5 (1), 2014; 'The Point of Europe' for Interventions, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18(2), 2016. More.

Fellows

Prof. Rosemarie Buikema

Rosemarie Buikema is professor 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. More.


Prof. Graham Huggan

My research spans the entire field of comparative postcolonial literary/cultural studies, and I also have interests in the areas of travel writing, ecocriticism, short fiction, and film. Recent publications include Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (co-written with Helen Tiffin, Routledge, 2010), Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2009), and a collection of essays, Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe (co-edited with Ian Law, Liverpool University Press, 2009). A revised collection of my own essays, Interdisciplinary Measures, came out in 2008, also with Liverpool University Press. Such work shows my continuing interest in cross-disciplinary approaches to postcolonial studies, as is also confirmed by the book series for which I am the founding co-editor, ‘Postcolonialism across the Disciplines’ (Liverpool University Press). Current projects include a book on the figure of the ‘celebrity conservationist’ (from Attenborough to Irwin) in the age of television, and I also hope to embark soon on a book-length study of postcolonial film. I am sole editor of the 250,000-word Oxford Handbook in Postcolonial Studies (estimated publication date 2012). More.

Prof. John McLeod

I work primarily in the field of postcolonial studies, and have particular interest in postcolonial representations of London, England and Britain. My book Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge 2004) explores how London has been rewritten by a variety of post-war writers, while my co-edited collection The Revision of Englishness (Manchester University Press 2004) considers the ways in which Englishness has been imaginatively reconsidered by different kinds of writers and film-makers. I am also interested in critical theories of the postcolonial ‘in action’ – my book, Beginning Postcolonialism, (second edition, Manchester University Press, 2010) attempts to introduce the key concepts in the field and consider their application to the reading of literature. I recently published the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Routledge, 2007), which engages with the histories, cultures, theories and key figures of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Hispanic postcolonial contexts. I have also published in the field of Caribbean and black British writing, and I maintain a healthy general interest in postwar British literature and the novel in general - in December 2007 Northcote House published my book J. G. Farrell, which concerns one of my favourite novelists. I’m on the editorial boards of a number of important journals in postcolonial studies – Moving Worlds, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, New Literatures Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature – and I’ve guest-edited two issues of Kunapipi (XXI, 2, 1999, and XXV, 1, 2003). I am an Associate Member of the Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur les Pays du Commonwealth (CERPEC) at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, France, and on the Advisory Board of the Nordic Network of Literary Transculturations based at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Dr. Birgit Kaiser

Birgit M. Kaiser studied sociology and comparative literature in Bochum, Madrid, London, and Bielefeld, and received her PhD in comparative literature from New York University. Since 2007, she teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research interests are literatures of the 18th to 20th century, contemporary aesthetic theory, postcolonial literatures, and the formation of subjectivity. She is author of Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (SUNY Press, 2010), editor (with Lorna Burns) of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze. Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), editor (with Kathrin Thiele) of Diffracted Worlds, Diffractive Readings. Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities’ (special issue of Parallax, July 2014) and editor of Singularity and Transnational Poetics (Routledge 2015). Recent work has also appeared in Textual Practice, International Journal for Francophone Studies, Parallax and Interventions. Together with Kathrin Thiele, she coordinates the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica.

Prof. Paulo de Medeiros

Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literature at Warwick University (UK). He has taught at several universities in Portugal, Brasil, Spain and the Netherlands. In 2011-2012 is Keeley Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. His research centers on Luso-Brazilian narrative, literary and cultural theory with a focus on the interrelations between politics and literature. He has edited Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literature (Utrecht, 2007) and co-edited a number of journal issues in Portugal as well as in the UK and USA. He previously held the Chair of Portuguese Studies at Utrecht University and was co-founder of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative with Sandra Ponzanesi.


Affiliated members

Dr. Epp Annus

I am a senior researcher with the Estonian Literary Museum (Cultural Theory Research Group) and a lecturer at Ohio State University (Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures). My interests in postcolonial studies involve questions of Soviet (post)colonialism, the phenomenological study of everyday experience under Soviet rule, and affective structures of (post)colonial experience in the Sovietized Baltic states. My publications include a monograph "Kuidas kirjutada aega" [How to Tell Time, 2002], a novel "Sina, Matilda" [Matilda, 2007], a co-authored volume "Eesti kirjanduslugu" [A History of Estonian Literature, 2001], and an edited volume "20. sajandi mõttevoolud" [20th Century Movements of Thought, 2009]. My recent publications include a co-authored essay on Homi Bhabha and an article “The Problem of Soviet Colonialism in the Baltics” in Journal of Baltic Studies 43.1 (2012). Click here for more information. 

Dr. Barnita Bagchi

Barnita Bagchi is a faculty member in Comparative Literature at the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Utrecht University. Educated at Jadavpur, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, she was previously on the faculty at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in India (where she is an Honorary Visiting Fellow). She is a Life Member of the graduate college and institute of advanced studies Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. Her areas of research and publication include eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British fiction (with a particular interest in female-centred and female-authored fiction), South Asian (especially Bengali) narrative writing, utopian writing, and South Asian and transnational history of culture and education. Her academic work on the South Asian Bengali Muslim writer Rokeya S. Hossain's female and feminist utopias (articles, book chapters, and a Penguin Classics critical edition and part-translation of two of Hossain's narratives) is widely used in academic courses globally. Her many publications in the field of postcolonial and transcultural studies include the edited and co-edited volumes Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Transfers in (Post)-colonial Education (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2014, co-editors E. Fuchs and K. Rousmaniere), The Politics of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered(New Delhi: SAGE, 2011), Webs of History: Information, Communication, and Technology from Early to Postcolonial India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005, co-editors A.K. Bagchi and D. Sinha).

Dr. Chiara Bonfiglioli
Chiara Bonfiglioli holds a PhD from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She holds a BA in Political Sciences from Bologna University, and she completed her MA in Gender and Ethnicity at Utrecht University in 2008, with a RMA thesis on 1970s transnational connections between Western European and Yugoslav feminists. Her PhD research focussed on an historical study of transnational encounters and connections between Italian and Yugoslav women affiliated to left-wing political organizations, from the early Cold War period till the end of the 1970s. Through a comparative, intersectional analysis, she explores the genealogy of women’s and feminist activism in Southern and South-Eastern Europe. Research interests include: women’s and feminist history, oral history, critical theory, post-colonial and post-socialist studies, Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav studies. Her PhD thesis can be accessed here.

Prof. Paul Bowman

Paul Bowman is Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Politics Research Group and co-director of the Reconstructing Multiculturalism Research Network at Cardiff University, UK. He is author of Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies (2007), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008) and Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), editor of Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), The Truth of Zizek (2007), The Rey Chow Reader (2010) and Reading Ranciere (2011), and editor of special issues of journals such as Parallax (1999-2009), Social Semiotics (2010), Postcolonial Studies (2010) and Educational Philosophy and Theory (2011).

Dr. Babs Boter

At Utrecht University, I co-teach (with PCI-cofounder Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi) the MA-course “Issues in Postcoloniality” (Department of Gender Studies). Two other BA-courses also make much use of postcolonial theory: “Gender & Diversity in U.S. Culture” (Gender Studies and American Studies, Utrecht University); and “Gothic Traditions: Cultural Critique” (Department of the Humanities, University College Utrecht). Finally, at Emerson College (Well Castle, Limburg), I teach “Topics in Global Literature: Gender, Race and Diaspora in Postcolonial Texts.” My current research focuses on Dutch and other European travelers’ accounts of North America (1870-1950) — in particular the ways in which female and male visitors to the US (Simone de Beauvoir, Aletta Jacobs, Johan Huizinga, many more) position themselves vis-à-vis America’s marginalized (and gendered, racialized) subjects. My dissertation, which I defended in 2005 (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam), is entitled: Fabrication of Selves: Girls of Color Coming of Age.

Dr. Gianmaria Colpani

Gianmaria Colpani is a PhD candidate of Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Verona (Italy) and Utrecht University (The Netherlands). His research concerns the intersections of sexuality, race, postcoloniality and nationalism in contemporary Europe. In particular, he is interested in the debates on homonormativity and homonationalism, with particular emphasis on the European context. He has published essays on this subject: "In Europe it's Different: Homonationalism and Peripheral Desires for Europe" (in LGBT Activism and the Making od Europe: A Rainbow Europe? Palgrave 2014) and "What is is European about Homonationalism: Thinking Through the Italian Case" (in Everyday Feminist Research Praxis, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014) - both co-authored - and "Omonazionalismo nel belpaese?" (in Il colore della nazione, Ediesse forthcoming). He has taught courses of feminist and postcolonial theory at Utrecht University.

Dr. Fadi Hirzalla

Fadi studied economics and political science (cum laude), with an additional minor study in social and political philosophy. At the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University, he specialized in topics relating to civic and political participation among young people, digital media, interculturalism, and research methods. He was participant in the CivicWeb project (www.civicweb.eu) as a PhD student, and subsequently joined the WiredUp project (http://www.uu.nl/wiredup) as a post-doc research fellow.



Dr. Sybille Lammes

Sybille Lammes is associate professor at Warwick University (UK).   In recent years her main research subjects have been related to the new media and digital culture. Her research programme in computer games examines how games can function as cultural spaces for new spatial and postcolonial practices. Her latest research programme in digital cartography looks at to what extent and how digital maps have altered meanings of borders in relation to postcolonialism. 

Dr. Koen Leurs

Koen Leurs is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, Department of Media and Communication. His Project 'U.P.L.O.A.D' Urban Politics of London Youth Analyzed Digitally' investigates the lived experience among young Londoners (aged 12-18) of different cultural backgrounds. He holds a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Utrecht University (NL), Research Institute of History and Culture. He was a member of ‘Wired Up’, a research project focusing on digital media use among migrant youth. He examines the gendered and ethnic interfacing of digital technologies, migration and global/local youth cultures. As a researcher for the European ‘Mig@Net’ project he explores education and knowledge in the contexts of transnational digital networks, migration and gender. Also he works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Radboud University Department of Literary and Cultural Studies (ACW) in Nijmegen. He has taught on the philosophy of science, the history and theory of new media, postcolonial ICTs and the spatiality of media. Koen takes a transdisciplinary approach on digital forms of identity, medium-specificity, power hierarchies, multiculturalism, diaspora, gender relations and youth culture by bridging gender studies, postcolonial studies and new media studies. He has presented at various national and international conferences and his work has been published in Feminist Review; M/C Journal; Religion and Gender, OBS* and anthologies such as Cyberfeminism 2.0; Intersectional Internet; the Routledge Companion to Media and Gender; the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media and Women and Language. His PhD thesis can be accessed here. More.

Dr. Susanne Knittel
Dr. Susanne Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She studied comparative literature at Konstanz University and at Yale, and holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York (2011). In her research she explores questions of memory, commemoration, and cultural amnesia. She is particularly interested in the dynamic interaction of literature and other cultural media as vehicles of both majority and minority memory at the local, national, and transnational level. Her monograph, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham University Press, 2014) presents a comparative and interdisciplinary study of German and Italian postwar memory culture. In it, she stages a dialogue between the fields of memory studies, disability studies, and postcolonial studies.
Other publications include ‘Beyond Testimony: Nazi Euthanasia and the Field of Memory Studies’, The Holocaust in History and Memory, vol. 5 (2012), and ‘Borderline Memory Disorder: The Risiera di San Sabba and the Staging of Italian National Identity’ in: Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, edited by Brigitte Sion (2014).

Dr. Sabrina Marchetti

Sabrina Marchetti is currently Jean Monnet post-doctoral fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence. She received her PhD in Gender and Ethnicity from the University of Utrecht in 2010. Marchetti has mainly specialised on issues of gender and migration, with a specific focus on the question of migrant domestic work. From a comparative perspective, she has studied the case of various nationalities of women who work in Italy and the Netherlands. She has published the books Black Girls. Migrant Domestic Worker and Colonial Legacies (Brill, 2014) and, in Italian, Le ragazze di Asmara. Lavoro domestico e migrazione postcoloniale(Ediesse, 2011). She has co-edited, with Anna Triandafyllidou, the special issue “Migrant Domestic and Care Workers in Europe: New Patterns of Circulation?” of the Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies (2013) and, in Italian, “Made in Italy. Identità in migrazione” of Zapruder (2012) with Enrica Capussotti and Andrea Brazzoduro.

Dr. Ana Cristina Mendes

Dr. Ana Cristina Mendes has been a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (CEAUL/ULICES) since 2005. Her areas of specialization are postcolonial and migration studies, with an emphasis on the cultural industries and exchanges in the global cultural marketplace. She has recently been pursuing research in the subfields of poverty studies, visual arts, cinemas and literatures of the Asian emerging economies, “hard” and “soft” borders, European citizenship, human trafficking, and movement control. Her publications include the co-edited book Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics (Routledge, 2011), the edited collection Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2012), and articles published in Third Text and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. A monograph based on her doctoral research is currently in press and will be published as Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace (Ashgate). She is currently editing a special issue of the journal Transnational Cinemas, “Walls and fortresses: borderscapes and archipelagos of exception in the cinematic imaginary,” forthcoming in 2015. More. Twitter: @anafmendes1.

Dr. Eva Midden

Eva Midden is Assistant Professor in Gender Studies, at the Media and Culture Studies Department, at Utrecht University. She has a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and wrote her PhD thesis 'Feminism in Multicultural Societies. An Analysis of Dutch Multicultural and Postsecular Developments and their Implications for Feminist Debates’ at the University of Central Lancashire (United Kingdom). She was recently involved in the European Research Project ‘MIGNET’ for which she conducted research on migration, gender and religious practices in new media. Her general research interests include feminist theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, (post)secular(ism), whiteness and media analysis. Her latest publications include: ‘Feminism and Cultural and Religious Diversity in Opzij. An analysis of the Dutch feminist magazine’, in: European Journal Women’s Studies 19 (2). Pp 216-232 andtogether with S. Ponzanesi: ‘Digital Faiths. An analysis of online practices of Muslim women in the Netherlands’. Special Issue Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 1, Part 3. November-December. 2013. Pp 197-204

Dr. Liesbeth Minnaard

Liesbeth Minnaard is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University. Before obtaining this position she studied and worked at Utrecht University, University College Dublin, the University of Trier, and Cornell University. Her main fields of expertise are interculturality in literature and cultural effects of globalisation. She has published widely on literature of migration, as well as on exoticism in literature, representations of the national, and issues of gender and sexuality. Her publications include the monograph  New Germans, New Dutch. Literary Interventions (Amsterdam University Press, 2008) and the edited volume Ethnizität und Geschlecht. (Post-)Koloniale Verhandlungen in Geschichte, Kunst und Medien (Cologne; Weimar; Vienna: Böhlau, 2005). Currently she is co-editing a volume on Literature, Language and Multiculturality in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (forthcoming 2011). Liesbeth Minnaard is one of the organizers of the bi-annual Flemish-Dutch Platform for Postcolonial Readings and a member of the international Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies (CePoG) at Trier University.

Dr. Domitilla Olivieri

Domitilla Olivieri is a lecturer at the department of Media and Culture Studies and affiliate researcher at the Research Institute for History and Culture, both at Utrecht University. Her primary areas of interest are at the crossroads of visual anthropology, documentary film, visual studies, gender studies, semiotics and cultural studies.
She completed her PhD at Utrecht University with a doctoral research entitled Haunted by Reality. Towards a feminist study of documentary film: indexicality, vision and the artifice, which she started thanks to a Marie Curie Fellowship.
Committed to bridging the distance between academic and non-academic milieus, she also collaborates with cultural institutes and activist groups in the Netherlands and in Italy, and participates to collaborative art and documentary projects. An example of this ongoing dialogue between scholars and practitioner is her article: “Shattered images and desiring matter. A dialogue between Hito Steyerl and Domitilla Olivieri”. In: Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, B. Papenburg and M. Zarzycka (eds.). IB Tauris, London, 2012. She has recently edited a volume in the field of feminist methodologies: Olivieri, Domitilla and Koen Leurs (eds.). Everyday feminist research praxis. Doing Gender in the Netherlands. Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2014). At the moment she is working on a research project on the use and concept of rhythm in documentary film.

Prof. Ieme van der Poel

Ieme van der Poel is Professor of French Literature at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the College of Humanities. Her main fields of interest are 20th century French and Francophone literature, Postcolonial Theory and French colonial history. Her current research projects include: "Diasporic Writing: A Comparative History of the New Moroccan Literatures in French, Spanish and Dutch", funded by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), and a full length monograph of the writings of Albert Camus: "Locating and Relocating Albert Camus." She is currently working on an annotated edition of Prousts Recherche for the Dutch Market (in collaboration with Ton Hoenselaars, translation by Thérèse Cornips). Since 2006 van der Poel serves at the scientific board of NIMAR, the Netherlands Institute in Rabat (Morocco). In the same year she initiated (in collaboration with prof. Andy Stafford, Leeds University) the International research group "Maghreb-Europe", a collaborative project of UvA, Leeds University and the University of Casablanca. In 2004 van der Poel was appointed Chevalier dans l' ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. Recent publications: Villes d' échange(s): Maghreb-Europe (co-edited with Abdelmajid Kaddouri), Casablanca, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines Ben Msi'k, 2009; Congo-Océan: un chemin de fer colonial controversé, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2006 (2 volumes). 

Dr. Christine Quinan

Christine Quinan joined Utrecht University’s Graduate Gender Programme teaching staff in 2014. Christine completed a Ph.D. in French with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation entitled “Remembering Bodies: Gender, Race, and Nationality in the French-Algerian War.” Christine works at the intersection of postcolonial studies and gender/sexuality studies and is currently at work on a project that investigates gender policing and surveillance in a post-9/11, postcolonial/neocolonial era and the effects this has on gender-nonconforming and transgender bodies and lives. Christine has published on questions of violence during the French-Algerian War as well as the writings of feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the work of Algerian writer Assia Djebar.


Dr. Emanuelle Radar

Emmanuelle Radar studied French literature and culture at the University of Amsterdam where she defended her PhD dissertation on French travel literature (“Putain de colonie!” Anticolonialisme et modernisme dans la littérature du voyage en Indochine (1919-1939), 2008). Since 2008, she has been teaching at the departments of French and Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her main research interests are French and Francophone literature of the 20th century, transcolonialism, the connection between literature, history and memory, early ‘anticolonialism’ and colonial discourse analysis. Recent publications include: Louis Roubaud. Viet Nam la tragédie indochinoise suivi d’autres récits sur le colonialisme, Paris: Harmattan – Coll. Autrement Mêmes, 2010; “Poskoloniale bommen en granaten! Kuifje in Afrika als ‘koloniale lieu de mémoire’”, Congo in de literatuur, Armada, nr. 58, 2010, pp. 89-104; “La (non)représentation d’Angkor, indice de (dés)illusion colonial”, Désillusion et désenchantement dans les littératures de l’ère coloniale, Cahiers de la SIELEC, nr. 6, 2010, pp. 399-424. She is currently working on literary and cinematographic representations of ruins as (post)colonial ‘lieux de mémoires’.

Prof. Mireille Rosello

Professor Mireille Rosello  teaches at the University of Amsterdam in the literary studies program and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her research focuses on Diasporic Studies (European, North African and Caribbean migrant) and Gender constructions (queer theories and cultures). Her most recent publications are The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (2009), France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (2005), its French version Encontres Méditerranéennes: Littératures et cultures France-Maghreb (2006) and Postcolonial Hospitality: the Immigrant as Guest (2001). She is currently working on a collection of essays on European multilingualisms and on "What's queer about Europe" (co-edited with S. Dasgupta).

Prof. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa), Portugal, where she teaches a diverse range of disciplines through a cultural studies approach. She is also a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies (Centro de Estudos Comparatistas) at the University of Lisbon, where she coordinated from 2007 to 2011 the project ‘DISLOCATING EUROPE: Postcolonial Perspectives in Literary, Anthropological and Historical Studies’.

She has published mainly on the following topics: travel literature, history of anthropology, postcolonial studies and, more recently, on anti-colonial nationalism and its diasporic connections. She is currently working on a book on identity issues in postcolonial Europe, considering processes of migration and the need to redefine the nation, with a special emphasis on the Portuguese context and its colonial past. Her present research interests concern postcolonial studies, African film, film and migration.Selected publication: Malhas que os impérios tecem. Textos anti-coloniais, contextos pós-coloniais. Lisbon: Edições 70, 2011; Europe in Black and White. Immigration, Race, and Identity in the ‘Old Continent'. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011; "Portugal não é um país pequeno". Contar o império na pós-colonialidade. Lisbon: Cotovia, 2006; and Deslocalizar a “Europa”. Antropologia, arte, literatura e história na pós-colonialidade. Lisbon: Cotovia 2005. 

Dr. Barbara Titus

Barbara Titus studied musicology at Utrecht University and gained her doctorate from Oxford University in the United Kingdom (M.St. Lincoln College [2000], D.Phil. St Anne's College [2005]) with a dissertation entitled ‘Conceptualizing music: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Hegelian currents in German music criticism, 1848-1871.’ (Leuven University Press [forthcoming]).
In 2007, she shifted her attention from German metaphysics to South African street music (maskanda), with the explicit aim to question the polarity that these two fields of investigation still seem to represent. From 2008 to 2013, Barbara worked as an assistant professor teaching European music history post-1800 at Utrecht University. In 2013, she was appointed associate professor of cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam. During two extensive field trips for her research into maskanda in 2008 and 2009, she was a visiting professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. In the winter semester 2013-14, she was a guest professor at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. Barbara is co-editor of the journal the world of music (new series), and is a member of the advisory board of the journal Music Theory and Analysis. Her book about maskanda is currently under review with the University of Chicago Press.

Prof. Berteke Waaldijk

Berteke Waaldijk is a historian who works on gender, culture and citizenship. Her research projects include:  history of women’s movement, citizenship and colonial culture in the Netherlands, Dutch post-colonial history, women and social work in Netherlands and the US, social welfare in Central and Eastern Europe (1900-1960) and practices of teaching & learning in gender studies. Berteke Waaldijk has designed and taught graduate courses on:- connections between women’s history & women’s fiction;  teaching with memories; gender, media and citizenship; women, welfare and globalization;  post colonial & post socialist perspectives; philosophies of the humanities;  valorizing knowledge in the humanities.Her publications include: Transforming the Public Sphere. The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898 co-authored with Maria Grever (Chapel Hill NC: 2004), Teaching with Memories. European Women’s Histories in International and Interdisicplinary Classrooms, co-authored with Andre Petö (Galway/Utrecht: ATHENA 2006); Guardians of the Poor – Custodians of the Public. Welfare History in Eastern Europe co-authored with Sabine Hering (Opladen 2006); Paths to Gender. European Historical Perspectives on Women and Men, co-edited with Carla Salvaterra (Pisa UP: Pisa 2009). She was the chair of the editing committee of the Tuning Gender Studies Brochure: Reference Points for Design and Delivery of Degree Programmes in Gender Studies (Brussels, EC/ Athena, 2010) She is a co-founder and senior fellow of Utrecht University Gender Studies Programme and holds the chair ‘Language and Culture Studies’ at Utrecht University, currently (2010-2013) she is vice dean for education in the Faculty of Humanities at this university.

Dr. Rolando Vázquez

Rolando Vázquez teaches sociology at the University College Roosevelt Academy, University of Utrecht. Since 2010 he coordinates with Walter Mignolo the Middelburg Decolonial Summer School. With Alanna Lockward and Walter Mignolo he is member of the Executive Board of the Transnational Decolonial Institute. He has written on decolonial thought, critical theory and photography. 

Prof. Gloria Wekker

Gloria Wekker is Professor in Gender and Ethnicity at the Department of Media and Culture Studies and Director of GEM, the expertise centre for gender, ethnicity and multiculturality in higher education at Utrecht University (NL). She is a social and cultural anthropologist (MA University of Amsterdam 1981; PhD UCLA, 1992), specializing in Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Caribbean Studies. She holds the Aletta chair in Gender and Ethnicity in the Faculty of the Arts at Utrecht University and is the coordinator of the one-year MA “Comparative Women’s studies in Culture and Politics”. Wekker locates herself as a representative of transnational, anti-racist, intersectional feminist theory and her research interests are in the following domains: constructions of sexual subjectivity in the black Diaspora; the history of the black, migrant and refugee women’s movement in the Netherlands and gendered and ethnicized/ racialized knowledge systems in Dutch society, including the academy.  One of her recent publications is The Politics of Passion; Women's sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (Columbia University Press, 2006), for which she was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists of American Anthropological Association (December 2007). More.

Dr. Doro Wiese 

Doro Wiese, PhD, is a lecturer of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She was trained in Film Studies and Literary Studies at the University of Hamburg. She received her PhD (with distinction, cum laude) from Utrecht University, where she was a Marie Curie doctoral research fellow and a Junior Teacher at the Gender Studies Program / Media and Culture Studies Department. Her monograph The Powers of the False: Reading, Writing, Thinking beyond Truth and Fiction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014) reflects on how literature can make it possible to represent
histories that are otherwise ineffable. Her current research aims to address forms of untranslatability in the highly acclaimed and globally circulating oeuvres of American Indian authors Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday and James Welch. In particular, this research will explore how their fictional configurations of time and space remain incommensurable for Western readers. Further interests include the relationship between literature and historiography, New Comparative Literature and untranslatability, intermediality, theories of affect, and critiques of (neo-)colonialism.
Contact: D.Wiese@uu.nl

PhD students

Laura Candidatu, PhD

Laura Candidatu has earned a BA degree in Political Sciences and a MA in Gender Studies at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest. She also followed the Intensive Postgraduate Programme at the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies. Her research interests focus on the East-West dynamics within the construction of the European Union, the relations between postcolonialism and post-socialist studies, European migration and intersectionality.

Julie Fraser, PhD

Julie Fraser commenced her PhD research in late 2013 with the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at Utrecht University. Julie is researching the use of social institutions (such as culture, religious and community organisations) to implement international human rights obligations, with a focus on Asia and Africa. Previously Julie practiced law as a qualified solicitor, including spending approximately two years with the Registry of the International Criminal Court and three years as a lawyer with the Australian Government Solicitor. Julie holds a BA and LLB (honours) from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and an LLM (cum laude) from Utrecht University.



Stacey Links, PhD

Stacey Links is currently doing her PhD in Human Rights in the Netherlands at the University of Utrecht. Her research focus is on Critical Theories of International Relations and the Perceived Legitimacy of the International Human Rights Regime in sub-Saharan Africa and China. Particularly of interest to her are the intersections of emergent post-colonial identities as well as regional social values vis-a-vis the International Human Rights Regime in these regions, and how these subsequently influence the perceived legitimacy of the regime. Engaging with critical perspectives on these issues is therefore at the core of her work.

Peter Maurits, BA

Peter Maurits a PhD candidate at the Ludwigs Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich. He holds a BA in Journalism, a BA in Portuguese Language and Culture, and a MA in Comparative Literature. He spent part of his study in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in Coimbra, Portugal and in Bern, Switzerland. His dissertation discusses the relation between the debate on the concept of world literature, and the debate on what could be called the global ghost story, which both reemerged after the collapse of real socialism. Special focus in the dissertation is on ghost stories from Mozambique.

Patricia Schor, MA

Patricia Schor is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. She holds a BA from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation – São Paulo, and an MA from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, with a thesis on Afro-Brazilian religions and emancipation. After her MA, she worked for five years at Oxfam-Novib, as Programme Officer Lusophone Africa. Her PhD research was initiated at King’s College London and transferred in 2008/9 to the Utrecht University. It focuses on the continuities and reconfigurations of the Portuguese empire in the contemporary narratives of the Portuguese language. And it seeks the manifestations of the imperial heritage, and its transformation, in three fundamental sites of Portuguese culture that represent points of contact with Africa, namely literature, language institutions and postcolonial theory. Patricia has conduced field research for her PhD in Lisbon in 2008/9, as Associated Researcher to the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon, member of the group Dislocating Europe: Post-Colonial perspectives in Literary, Anthropological and Historical Studies.

At Utrecht University she is an Affiliated Researcher to the Research Institute for History and Culture, member of the group Textual Culture. Patricia was awarded a Prince Bernhard Scholarship 2009 to carry out the comparative research project Language as art object: Africa in the representations of the Portuguese language through the dialogue Brazil – Portugal (in course in 2010). Her main research interests are post-imperial imaginaries, post-colonial representations of Africa, Border theory and language discourse.

Emmanuele Santos, MA

Emanuelle Santos is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She holds a BA in Portuguese and English languages and literatures and has finished her MA in Comparative Studies of Literatures written in Portuguese at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil). During her MA, she has studied the configurations of identity on contemporary Angolan fiction, and her PhD project, funded by the Brazilian Governmental CAPES Institute, aims to extend the studies on contemporary identity to other post-colonial African Lusophone literatures. Her research interests include: post-colonial theory, literary theory, critical theory, identity studies, African history and studies on post-modernity.