Editors-in-Chief
Nienke Veenstra
is currently a student of the Comparative Literary Studies RMA at Utrecht University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with philosophy, literature, and history as majors, which she obtained at University College Utrecht. Her research there focused on environmental science fiction, Gothic fiction, philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, and more specifically on scientific debates on Darwinism in nineteenth century literature and its influence on the perceived relation between humans and nature. Her current research interests are ecocriticism, Gothic studies, bio-ethics, animal studies, post- and transhumanism, and the intersection of philosophy and literature.
Anasuya Virmani
graduated from the University of Aberdeen with a degree in Literature and International Relations. Her interests lie across the fields of Trauma Literature, remembrance of war and atrocity, visual politics, Political Islam and environmentalism. She has previously written on visual refugee discourse, neo-Ottomanism, Algerian protest songs and the representation of 9/11 jumpers in literature. In her future research she aims to explore the intersection of the two disciplines further by studying literature, visual art and music as International Relations.
Editorial Staff
Luna Njoku Dominguez
is a current RMA student on the Comparative Literary Studies programme at Utrecht University. Prior to her master’s, she studied Liberal Arts at the University of Leeds where she majored in Cultural Studies. She is primarily interested in research surrounding utopianism, both as a literary genre and as a method and mode of thinking more broadly. In particular she is interested in exploring the limits and potentialities of the utopian impulse and the ways in which the traditional utopian concept has been reimagined and reclaimed to acknowledge marginalised narratives. Currently she is focused on speculative explorations of more-than-human futurities, as well as the various iterations of gender separatist utopias in literature, film, and society. She also enjoys writing poetry and visits to the cinema.
Luka Hattuma
is currently a student of the RMA Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. She obtained her BSc International Development Studies at Wageningen University, where she focused primarily on marginalized entities, activism and nature conservation. In her previous research, she engaged with (the intersection of) convivial conservation, Indigenous people and non-human existence. In doing so, embracing different onto-epistemologies in-and-beyond literature has been, and still is, a common thread in her research. Her current fields of interests include posthumanism, counter-narratives, animal studies and ecocriticism.
Mara van Herpen
is a graduate of the RMA Comparative Literary Studies as well as the BA Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Their research interests include life writing, ecocriticism, new materialism, and the posthumanities. Their previous work has focused on the role of the arts in (re-)imagining relations between humans, nonhumans, and the environment. She also writes short stories and poetry.
Marije Huging
is a current student of the RMA programme Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Previously, she obtained her BA at University College Roosevelt, where she studied literature, history and anthropology. In her previous research, she has focused on the construction of human sexuality in cultural objects, looking specifically at feminist subversions of patriarchal notions of female sexuality in literary texts and film. Right now, her research interests include women’s writing, cultural memory studies and the environmental humanities.
Isolde Kors
is a student of the RMA Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in cultural history and literary studies, both obtained at Utrecht University. In her research, she studies the interrelations between culture and politics, with a current focus on literature and environmentalism. She is interested in how methodologies from the fields of literary studies and history can complement and respond to one another in approaching these questions.
Thomas Meijs
holds a BA in philosophy from Utrecht University. He is planning to continue his studies in philosophy next year at the KU Leuven and is currently based in Brussels. Their main research interest is the intersection between metaphysics and aesthetics through figures such as Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Simondon and Souriau. Intertwined with his research practice he occupies himself with photography and has developed a growing affection for trees and the political potential of magical realism, mythology, and religion.
Lisa van Straten
is a graduate of the BA Literary Studies and soon-to-be student of the research master Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. In her previous research, she has focused primarily on narrative identity in relation to (cultural) memory and trauma theory by analyzing the manifold ways in which literary texts and discourses (de)construct individual identity, particularly in regard to the female identity. Building on this theoretical framework, her current research is concerned with the usages and transformations of canonical themes, genres and archetypes in literature from the 1900s until the 1950s.