In Memoriam: Paul Mepschen (1976-2025)

Our colleague, friend, lecturer, mentor and social anthropologist Paul Mepschen passed away on 6 November 2025, leaving us behind in heartfelt sorrow and disbelief.

Students will remember Paul as a warm, humorous and slightly chaotic personality who cared deeply for his students. He was a lecturer with an immense reservoir of knowledge who nevertheless positioned himself as an equal. Paul spoke passionately about global inequalities in class and inspired many of his students. The impact Paul had on many of his students was well summarized by a former student in an email: “He was one of the most inspiring professors I've had the pleasure of knowing, and alongside other former students, my current academic path was greatly formed thanks to his kind guidance and passion-filled classes.” 

In 2021, Paul was rewarded the Teacher of the Year award, an honorary title that he had not seen coming. He felt honored, yet at the same time found it problematic that such awards suggest we owe our achievements solely to ourselves. Or, as Paul put it in his thank-you speech: “ We live in a neoliberal society where individual merit is often valued above collective effort and where the relational character of labor, including academic labor, is often, too often, ignored.”

Paul taught numerous courses on subjects such as gender and sexuality, social theory, citizenship and difference, (sexual) nationalism, political economy, (de)coloniality and ethnographic methods at Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, the Institute for International Education of Students Abroad (IES), and the School of Gender Studies in Amsterdam.

Paul Mepschen was born in 1976 in Coevorden, Drenthe. His interest in politics and people, as well as his strong sense of justice, led him to study social and cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008, Paul graduated cum laude. In 2016, he defended his PhD thesis at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, again cum laude and under the supervision of Prof. Willem Duyvendak and Prof. Evelien Tonkens. His research in the neighborhood Nieuw-West in Amsterdam revolved around topics such as the constructed difference between so-called ‘autochthonous’ and ‘allochthon’ citizens, racialization, anti-Muslim racism, sexual nationalism, and the erosion of social housing policies in a predominantly neoliberal political climate.

As an adolescent, Paul came to the conclusion that he was anticapitalist, antimilitarist and that the world needed to be radically transformed, “and all of that in the Coevorden library.”[1] In the early 2000s, Paul became active in the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) and worked in Rotterdam as a policy advisor for the same party in the city council. He would always remain an activist at heart, committed to building a new left movement. Within academia, Paul was deeply concerned about a global political climate in which science in general, and gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory in particular, are being cast as suspect. A climate in which forces both within and outside local governments once again seek to render marginalized groups, such as transgender people, invisible. Paul stood up for scholars and activists who draw on a long and rich tradition of critical research on social relations in contexts of inequality. At UCU, Paul spoke out against cuts to scholarships for students and supported UCU in Solidarity with Palestine. As some of his friends wrote in their obituary in NRC newspaper: “You rarely see people so engaged with the world.” Although he was deeply concerned about the troubled times we live in, Paul consistently encouraged his students to stay hopeful and to face the future with optimism.

Paul was a very social and loyal colleague and friend who enjoyed organizing dinners and other get-togethers. Conversations often blended political topics and social engagement with personal stories and always sprinkled with humor and wordplay. 

Dear Paul, we are thinking of your family, especially your parents and your nephew and niece, whom you adored and admired. We will hold you with us and find comfort in your academic legacy; in your kindness; your audacity. As a colleague-friend of yours said at the memorial meeting on our campus: “We will be passing on what you have left behind- in remembrance of your transformative joy, your curiosity of thought and your openness to what arises between people.”

I will end this in memoriam in your own words. Paul, “See you Latour”!

Rhoda Woets