Clara Vlessing is an interdisciplinary scholar in the humanities and an affiliated researcher of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON). Her work looks at the relationship between memory and social movements with particular attention to the role of gender. She teaches literary and cultural analysis across media; theories of memory, decolonisation and gender; and creative and academic writing.

Clara has worked as a lecturer at UU since 2018. In June 2023 defended her PhD, which was a part of the ERC-project Remembering Activism. In 2024 she was a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO NWA-ORC project Heritages of Hunger at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She is co-chair of the Memory Studies Association’s Memory and Activism Working Group and has held organisational roles with the International Auto/biography Association and Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies. 

Her expertise on the cultural remembrance of radical women is reflected in her peer-reviewed articles (Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 2021, Social History/Histoire Sociale 2023), book chapters (The Visual Memory of Protest, AUP 2023, Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization, De Gruyter 2025) and co-edited collection (Remembering Contentious Lives, Palgrave 2025). 

Clara is currently working on a monograph ‘Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst’ which will be published in De Gruyter's series on Media and Cultural Memory Studies.