Current PhD Research

Jilt Jorritsma | Mapping the Sinking City: Anticipatory Futures, Past Traces and the Imagination of Urban Submergence in Amsterdam, New York and Mexico City

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.

Message from OSL’s PhD Representatives

26 August 2020
With this message we would like to inform you that we, Kim Schoof (OU) and Judith Jansma (RUG), are the PhD representatives of OSL. This concretely means two things. First, we represent your interests during our quarterly meetings with the advisory board of OSL. Second, our goal is to create a closer community of OSL PhD candidates, which is why we want to reanimate the yearly PhD day.

Ahmed Nuri | The Representational and Structural Anxieties of Turkish Literary Modernity Literary

Ahmed Nuri | The Representational and Structural Anxieties of Turkish Literary Modernity Literary

Ahmed Nuri | University of Amsterdam
This research project intends to understand and investigate the relationship between the notion of modernity and literature in the context of the Ottoman-Turkish modernization through the literary works of three prominent Turkish novelists, Ahmet H. Tanpınar, Adalet Agaoglu, and Orhan Pamuk.

Kim Schoof | Literature as “compearance-attestation”

Kim Schoof | Open Universiteit
In the last decades, the popularity of autobiographical literature has increased in such a way that today, ‘it qualifies as a cultural obsession’. (diBattista and Wittman, The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography 2014: 1) While postmodern philosophy criticized the idea that anyone can attest directly to their “true” experiences in written text, writers – feeling encouraged rather than disheartened – never stopped finding creative and aesthetic ways to do so.

Clara Vlessing | Defiant Women

Clara Vlessing | Utrecht University
My project looks at the cultural afterlives of women activists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It serves as a case study within the wider ERC project ReAct (Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe since 1871), which analyses the relationship between civil resistance and cultural memory in Europe since the late nineteenth century.

Juan Del Valle Rojas | Imagining the Unpredictable: Communication, Power and Technology in José Ricardo Morales’ Transnational Theatre

Juan Del Valle Rojas | University of Groningen
My PhD research is mainly focused on the transnational and interdisciplinary dimension of Communication, Power and Technology in the work of Spanish-Chilean playwright José Ricardo Morales. In particular, my goal is to shed light on the problematization of communication processes and power appropriation in Morales’ plays and essays.