PhD's 

Kevin Hoogeveen
From October 2024 onwards, Kevin is a PhD Candidate in Ancient History. His project, funded by the NWO PhD in the Humanities funding scheme, will focus on the migratory behavior of the rural population of Egypt in Late Antiquity (284 – 642 CE). Thanks to sociological theory on migration, studying the peasantry’s migratory behavior – that is, both mobility and immobility -, is a way of researching the agency of individuals who have left little other traces in the papyrological source material than information on where they lived, rented land, or worked. This approach allows for adding a perspective ‘from below’ to the socio-economic history of Late Antiquity. The project is supervised by dr. Sofie Remijsen and prof.dr. Daniëlle Slootjes.

Feel free to reach out in case you see opportunities for collaboration or want to know more about the project: k.m.w.hoogeveen@uva.nl

Lotte Knijn
Lotte Knijn has recently joined ASH as a PhD student in Classics researching the characterization of women in ancient epic through direct speech. During her BA and MA in Classics at the UvA, linguistic and narratological approaches to poetic style and literary characters, especially women, sparked her interest. Her research combines those interests with a digital framework provided by the Digital Initiative for Classics: Epic Speeches (DICES), an extensive database for the study of direct speech in ancient epic poetry.

Lena Vercauteren
Lena Vercauteren (they/them) is a writer, editor, dramaturg and PhD researcher, affiliated at the University of Ghent, Belgium and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Their PhD research focuses on the positions and practices of institutional dramaturgs at Flemish and Dutch city-theatres. Through conversations, field notes and historical discourse analysis they study the evolution, possibilities, and limits of institutional dramaturgy in Flanders and the Netherlands, with an interest in the various intersections between theatre, urban studies, dramaturgy (training) and repertoire. They also work for Etcetera, a Flemish magazine for the performing arts, and write various things whenever there is time left.

Federica Colella
Hello everyone! I am Federica Colella (MA in Anthropology of the Ancient World at the University of Siena) and I am currently a PhD researcher at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, enrolled in a joint PhD with the UvA, supervised by Caroline Kroon and Lidewij van Gils. My purpose is to delve into the embodiment of emotions, cognitive linguistics and narratology. My research focuses on exploring vulnerability and conceptual metaphors related to emotional wounds within Latin texts, aming to uncover deeper insights into ancient emotional experiences. I am looking forward to getting involved in ASH!

Ramon Selles
My name is Ramon and I studied Greek and Latin Classics, with a focus on Latin literature. In my PhD-project, I examine the relationship between humans and non-human nature in Latin literature from the early Roman Empire. I am analysing various texts, both poetry and prose, from an ecocritical angle, looking at such themes as disaster, water management, agriculture, and animals. I also have a strong interest in reception studies and literary translation.

Assistant Professor

Steve Jankowski
Steve Jankowski is an Assistant Professor in New Media Histories at the Media Studies Department. He received his PhD in Communication and Culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada for his dissertation on the history of the political design of encyclopedic media. He also holds an MA in Communication from the University of Ottawa and an Honours Bachelors of Design from the York \ Sheridan Design Program. 

Suze Zijlstra
Suze Zijlstra is the new Assistant Professor in Public History of Slavery. She is specialized in Dutch colonial history and histories of slavery in Asia and the Atlantic. Her PhD (2015) focused on power relations in seventeenth-century Suriname, and in 2021 she published her book De voormoeders. Een verborgen Nederlands-Indische familiegeschiedenis, in which she explored the lives of the Asian and Eurasian women in her own family history in the past three centuries. In addition to her position at the UvA, she works as a research curator at Het Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam.

Tjalling Valdés Olmos
Tjalling Valdés Olmos is Assistant Professor of Global Media Histories at the Department of Media Studies. His work analyzes how the globalization of spatial genres mediates the function of and resistance to settler colonialism. Working with decolonial and queer methodologies, his research broadly asks how media and genre shape the tricky ways in which people historically, affectively, and differentially inherit and navigate interlocking forms of power and oppression. Other areas of interest include speculative history; archival illegibilities; histories of emotion; cultural critique and analysis; pop cultural mediations of ambivalence, coalitions, normativity, and difference; indigenous studies; queer of color critique; multilingual and transnational media; cultural geography and rural studies. 

Currently he is co-editing a forthcoming volume with Esther Peeren on cultural imaginations of the rural (Brill 2025) and is working on a monograph titled Affective Inheritances: Rurality, Genre, and Settler Colonial Legacies in Contemporary US Pop Culture (Rowman & Littlefield / Bloomsbury). Tjalling previously taught at the department of Literary & Cultural Analysis (UvA) and in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. He obtained a BA in Chinese Studies at Leiden University, an MA in History of International Relations at the LSE, and an rMA in Gender & Ethnicity Studies at Utrecht University. He defended his PhD dissertation in 2023 at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) as part of the ERC-funded project 'Imagining the Rural in a Globalized World'. 

Postdocs

Jasper Bongers
With colleagues Bart Wallet and Martijn Lak I am conducting research on Jewish war orphans (1945-present). Before this I worked as a committee clerk at the municipality of Landsmeer and as a PhD candidate at the Open University. In November I hope to defend my dissertation Are all citizens equal? ​​Exploring public health citizenship in Utrecht, 1866-2001.

Nathanje Dijkstra
Hello everyone, my name is Nathanje Dijkstra and I am happy to have joined the department as a postdoctoral researcher. Rejoining, I must say, because I completed my Research Master’s in History, right here in this very department. Over the past nine years, I have worked as a lecturer, PhD-researcher and then again as a lecturer at Utrecht University. I am delighted to now continue my journey as part of the 'Re-authoring Meat Consumption Narratives'-project, collaborating with Samuël Kruizinga and Lisa Haushofer.

As a cultural historian, my research is driven by a deep interest in the ways in which concepts of illness and health, and categories of disability and ability, have found a form of naturalness in practice - and the social consequences of that process. I also have a keen interest in theoretical reflections on doing history. In my dissertation, I explored how disability was historically produced through encounters between government officials, doctors, and disabled workers in social security appeals in the Netherlands (1901–1967). Now, I have the opportunity to blend my expertise in the history of disability and work with food history, by investigating the role that meat consumption played in notions of productivity, energy and work capacity, particularly in the rehabilitation of injured and disabled workers.

I’m very excited to be part of the department and eager to get to know all of you. Since research can sometimes feel like a solitary endeavor, I'm always up for a coffee or a chat—so please don’t hesitate to reach out!