Current PhD Research

Sofía Forchieri | Radboud University
Current conversations taking place in the fields of memory studies and perpetrator studies insist on the need to complicate the victim-perpetrator binary in order to capture the systemic underpinnings of violence. Central to these debates are the arts, where indirect forms of involvement that enable large-scale harms are being explored with intensified urgency.

Jilt Jorritsma | Open Universiteit
Due to the accelerated rise of sea levels and global temperatures, several of the world’s major cities are slowly sinking into the sea, while others are sinking because of an increase of groundwater evaporation. Adaptation to these problems is highly reliant on the development of future imaginaries: predictive imagery (maps, narratives, scenarios) that visualizes future realities of submergence in order to shape present-day actions and decisions.

This year’s edition of the Harvard-based Institute of World Literature programme took place — for the first time online… OSL PhDs Jesse van Amelsvoort (Groningen – Campus Fryslân) and Ahmed Nuri (Amsterdam) took part in the programme, and shared their impressions with us.

This research aims to study and understand the link between European travel chronicles from the 19th century onwards, and how these texts were reproduced by the early Chilean press. The research project addresses the continuities and discontinuities, and the similarities and differences between both of them. 
Chronicle has been traditionally analyzed and differentiated by identifying three essential periods: The chronicle of the Indias from the 15th to 18th century; The modernist chronicle from the second half (and especially the end) of the 19th century; And the contemporary chronicle from the 1960s and 1970s up today. Notwithstanding, some researchers have pointed to a lack of knowledge, especially with regard to the period between the chronicle of the Indias and the modernist chronicle.

Judith Jansma | University of Groningen
In today’s political discourse the idea of a culturally-grounded national identity has made a strong come-back. One can think of Theresa May’s (in)famous  statement that “citizens of the world are actually citizens of nowhere”, or Dutch Christian-democratic party CDA insisting on the integration of the national hymn in the primary school curriculum. Yet this adherence to national identity as a way to deal with complex societal challenges (globalization, multiculturalism) is performed to a much greater extent by populist parties associated with the far right. Their understanding of citizenship being based on the notion of “ethnos” rather than “demos” – leading to a strong “us vs. them” narrative – it should not come as a surprise that culture is an important tool to unite “us” and to exclude “them”.