Teaching Staff
Dr. Laura Candidatu
Laura Candidatu is currently a lecturer in the Gender Graduate Program in the Media and Culture Studies Department. 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.
Dr. Gianmaria Colpani
Gianmaria Colpani is a Lecturer at the Graduate Gender Programme. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Verona (Italy) and Utrecht University (the Netherlands) in May 2017. His research concerns contemporary transformations in the field of queer theory and sexual politics, especially as the latter intersect with issues of race and class. He is particularly interested in the emergence over the past twenty years of the theorico-political currents of queer Marxism, queer of color critique and queer diasporic critique. Additional interests are: the history of the field of cultural studies and the relations between Marxism and so-called post-Marxism.
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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.
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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.
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Dr. Adriano Habed Dr. Ida Hansen Dr. Koen Leurs Dr. Jamila Mascat Dr. Aminata Mbaye Dr. Eva Midden Dr. Domitilla Olivieri Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi 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 Prof. Dr. Berteke Waaldijk
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.
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.
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 a PhD in Philosophy (University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom). Midden’s current research focuses on gender, religion and national identity in the context of conversion to Islam. Her general research interests include feminists theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, (post)secular(ism), whiteness and media analysis.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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Berteke Waaldijk is professor of Language- and Culture Studies at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University and works at the Graduate Gender Programme. Waaldijk’s research focuses on gender, culture and citizenship. She publishes on history and gender of Social Work in the Netherlands and in Europe, on colonial culture and citizenship, on history of Dutch Women’s movements and on gender, history and philosophy of the humanities.
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