Faculty of Humanities welcomes four new Full Professors
Kathrin Thiele, Danielle van den Heuvel, Birgit M. Kaiser, and Cadence Kinsey appointed
This summer, four new professors have been appointed at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. Kathrin Thiele has been serving as Professor of Gender, Culture and Ecologies since 15 July. And as of 1 September, Danielle van den Heuvel, Professor of Social and Economic History; Birgit M. Kaiser, Professor of Comparative Literature; and Cadence Kinsey, Professor of Contemporary Art and Global and Social Challenges, also started at their new posts.
Gender, Culture and Ecologies
Kathrin Thiele has longstanding research expertise as a queer feminist and cultural critic, and joined the Utrecht Faculty of Humanities as Assistant Professor in 2010. “My chair focusses on interdisciplinary research that explores the complex ecologies of processes of inclusion for planetary transformation. As Professor of Gender, Culture and Ecologies, I look forward to further contributing to the intellectual legacy of Gender Studies at our faculty and university with this research expertise.”
Given today’s worldwide challenges, Thiele believes it is important to undo nature-culture divisions. “We should become literate in ecological entanglement and the humanities perspective can be of great use to debates on these topics. It can reveal and address the systemic issues of in- and exclusion rooted in colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist structures.”
Social and Economic History
Danielle van den Heuvel’s research centres on questions of power dynamics, gender relations, and the writing of the overlooked in the context of major societal transitions. “As a Professor of Social and Economic History, I will continue delving into these topics, with an emphasis on everyday experiences of urban dwellers between 1500 and 1800.”
“Utrecht socio-economic historians are renowned worldwide for their reconstructions of historical economies using big data. However, there is an increasing awareness that the data used do not sufficiently represent significant groups, such as women and migrants. Therefore, my research is also dedicated to developing methodological innovations, using Digital Humanities, to obtain better data and insights into historical societies. I look forward to collaborating with colleagues in the wider Faculty to address these and similar issues.”
Comparative Literature
Birgit M. Kaiser’s research focuses on narrative and poetry written in French, German, and English, from around 1800 until today. In 2007, she started at Utrecht University as Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature. “Now, I want to centrally devote my Chair of Comparative Literature to post- and decolonial literary critique and research on contemporary theories of subjectivities, including questions of multilingualism and (un)translatability.”
Kaiser understands literature as a unique form of knowledge-production, which centrally contributes to understanding the socio-cultural world around us. “I’m interested in questions such as: how is a modern sense of ‘self’ entangled with colonial othering and the monolingual paradigm of the nation state? And, for example, which alternative, feminist, and ec(h)ological stories of selfhood do fiction and poetry experiment with?”
Contemporary Art and Global and Social Challenges
As Chair of Contemporary Art and Global and Social Challenges, Cadence Kinsey’s research will focus on the ways in which different visual cultures, from art to design and the media, respond to, reflect, and reproduce major challenges of our time. “I passionately believe that an analysis of the visual can contribute to understandings of the social,” she says.
Of particular interest is the way in which social, economic, and ecological conditions shape identity and our thinking about it. “At Utrecht University I will be continuing work on my new project, which examines the relationship between images and inequality. Central to this is the work of art: since images do not merely reflect society but actively make it, I look to the ways in which inequality has been represented and mediated both in art and wider visual cultures.”