Teaching Staff
Dr. Laura Candidatu
Laura Candidatu is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Studies Department. She is affiliated to the Graduate Gender Program where she coordinates the two BA Minors in Gender and Postcolonial Studies. Her areas of expertise are gender and diaspora, media and migration, and digital ethnography. She has published research on the topic of feminist methodological approaches to digital media, digital diaspora, and the role of motherhood in migration and diasporic processes.
Read more
Dr. Gianmaria Colpani
Gianmaria Colpani is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP), Department of Media and Culture Studies. 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.
Read more
Dr. Layal Ftouni
Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme, and a research affiliate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. As a core faculty member, Layal teaches variety of courses in Gender Studies and supervises dissertations on MA, RMA, and PhD levels. Layal’s research and teaching is transdisciplinary. She works across the fields of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, political philosophy, visual studies and critical race studies. Layal is currently working on a new research project (2020-2024) funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) tentatively entitled Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival. The research explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death (both human and environmental) in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine.
Read more
Dr. Magdalena Górska
Magdalena Górska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She holds doctorate in philosophy from the Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies at Linköping University. Magdalena’s research focuses on feminist politics of vulnerability. She is the author of Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability and a founder of the Breathing Matters Network.
Read more
Dr. Adriano Habed Dr. Ida Hansen Dr. Lieks Hettinga Dr. Koen Leurs Dr. Jamila Mascat Dr. Aminata Mbaye Dr. Eva Midden Dr. Ana Miranda Mora Dr. Domitilla Olivieri Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi Dr. Gerwin van Schie Dr. Zuleika Sheik Prof. Dr. Kathrin Thiele Professor of Gender, Culture & Ecologies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies (MCW) at Utrecht University. Since 2023, she directs the Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP) and she is also Academic Director of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG), which is hosted by Utrecht University. Trained transdisciplinarily in Gender Studies, Sociology, Literary Studies and Critical Theory, her research engages with questions of critical inquiry, ethics and politics from queer feminist, decolonial and posthuman(ist) philosophical perspectives. Her work aims to intervene in discussions around differences, in/equality, de/coloniality, ecologies and post/humanisms, and her critical attention lies most of all with the troubling consequences of a relational understanding of the world. She deeply engage with the inherent frictions, the processes of in/exclusion and the always asymmetrical power relations we inhabit. Dr. Milica Trakilovic
Adriano Habed currently works as an Assistant Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University, Department of Media and Culture Studies. Between 2015-2018, after graduating in Philosophy from the University of Turin (IT) and Radboud University Nijmegen (NL) he worked as a professional for the European Association of Gender Research, Education, and Documentation (ATGENDER) and for the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI). Additionally, Adriano was research assistant for a project on the role of postcolonial public intellectuals in Europe at Utrecht University (2015-2017). From 2018 to 2022, he conducted his PhD research on queer critique and its discontents at the University of Verona (IT) and Utrecht University. His project was part of the INVITE doctoral programme, co-financed by the European Union within the framework of the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Programme and by Regione Veneto.
Read more
Ida is a PhD-researcher based at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University where they also teach in the Graduate Gender Programme. Additionally, Ida works with the Relation(al) Matters Archive where they assist in practical and intellectual matters as well as manage technical aspects related to the webpage and the virtual events. Ida’s research explores experience of loss as it is rendered in contemporary biomedical research literature on grief as diagnosis and personal accounts of loss. Working from a combined perspective of feminist ontoepistemology and queer and feminist uses of psychoanalytic theory their project reconfigures experience of loss in radically performative terms, asking not what grief is but what it does to or how it animates a sense of being in the world.
Read more
Dr. Lieks Hettinga is an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Utrecht University. Their research is situated at intersections of transgender studies, disability studies, critical theory, and visual culture. Their research examines ways in which artists and activists visualize, represent and/or enact non-normative embodiment, more specifically looking at the intersection of trans and disability visual politics and poetics of the body. Their research interests include trans-crip affinities in critiques of (neo)liberalism and debates about how race and disability underpin and/or trouble contemporary Western consolidations of ‘transgender’ as an identity category. They are currently preparing a monograph based on their PhD dissertation (2021), tentatively titled Appearing Differently: Trans-Crip Aesthetics of Refusal.
Read more
Koen Leurs is Assistant Professor in Gender and Postcolonial studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. He works on digital migration, and he is the principal investigator of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research-funded study “Young Connected Migrants. Comparing Digital Practices of Young Asylum Seekers and Expatriates in the Netherlands,” and the Dutch National Research Agenda funded participatory action research project “Media literacy through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Young Newcomers.”
Read more
Jamila M. H. Mascat is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Siena with a dissertation on Hegel’s critique of the notion of abstraction. As a core faculty member, she teaches a variety of courses in Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Critical Race Studies, and supervises dissertations on MA, RMA, and PhD levels. She is also the coordinator of the MA Gender Studies. 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.
Read more
Aminata Mbaey is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme. Trained transdisciplinary in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and literary studies, Aminata’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 and writers, as well as religious authorities, Aminata’s first monograph ‘Les discours sur l’homosexualité au Sénégal. L’analyse d’une lute représentationnelle’ scrutinizes the emergence of new postcolonial representations, discourses and practices concerning sexuality and same-sex intimacy in Senegal.
Read more
Eva Midden is Associate Professor in Gender Studies, at the Media and Culture Studies Department of Utrecht University. She has a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and a PhD in Philosophy (University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom). Midden’s current research focuses on gender, love and (non-)monogamy. She is working on a book about women and (in)fidelity. Her general research interests include feminist theory, intersectionality, (post)secular(ism), nationalism, whiteness and media analysis.
Read More
Dr. Ana Miranda Mora is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Programme. Her academic research, teaching, and political engagement focus on urgent issues of social justice, equality, democracy, and the rule of law, particularly in relation to domination and violence amidst political, economic, and social power hierarchies. Her 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.
Read more
Domitilla Olivieri is Assistant Professor at the department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Domitilla is an anthropologist, activist, researcher and teacher in the field of gender studies, media and society. She is active in academic, artistic and activist spaces and has been involved for many years in feminist, queer and anti-racist and anti-capitalist militant activism.
Read more
Sandra Ponzanesi is professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the department of Media and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University. She studied English and Commonwealth Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy) and University of Sussex (UK). Her expertise is gender and postcolonial critique from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Her research areas include postcolonial studies, transnational feminist theories, comparative literature, Italian colonial history, European migration studies, visual culture, postcolonial cinema, media and conflict studies.
Read more
Gerwin van Schie is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at Utrecht University. In 2022, he concluded the NWO-funded PhD-project “Datafication of Race and Ethnicity in the Netherlands: Investigating Practices, Politics and Appropriation of Governmental Open Data”. In this research, Van Schie focussed on how Dutch immigrant populations are ‘datafied’ by various societal institutions. Van Schie critically reflects on bias and injustice caused by the data sources, systems, and practices of applications based on CBS statistics by employing a critical data studies approach with a postcolonial perspective.
Read more
Zuleika Sheik is an assistant professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She is involved in the courses ‘Art and Society: Experimental Fieldwork’; ‘Feminist Research Practice’; ‘Historiography of Feminist Ideas’; ‘Postcolonial Transitions and Transnational Justice’; ‘Researching Arts and Society I’.
Read more
Read more
Milica Trakilovic is a teacher at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University. She is also the coordinator of the minors Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies. She obtained her PhD at Utrecht University and her PhD research involved a critical interrogation of the idea of Europe from so-called marginal and marginalized positions, motivated by an understanding of belonging and nationhood in general, and Europe and Europeanness in particular, as a complex set of discursive practices that have material effects. Her research interests focus on postcolonial and postsocialist transitions and issues of European nationhood and belonging, as well as visual culture and feminist art practice.
Read more