I am a researcher and writer and am based in Amsterdam. I was trained in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. I am currently pursuing my PhD at the GCSC in Giessen, and have been a guest researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) during 2021. I have a broad interest in relationality and critical embodiment and am working on a dissertation on medically unexplained symptoms.
My dissertation focuses on the problematic encounter between the lived/felt/experienced physical symptom in relation to their unexplained status in medical science. My research is highly interdisciplinary, hovering between critical cultural theory, the medical humanities, philosophy and cultural studies. I lay emphasis on the politics of sex class and race in relation to dominant medical science, and the way in which some bodies hold less credibility in the medical system. I am to stay close to medical science as a practice, that is, while reflecting on the difficulty to account for the body vis a vis medical science, I maintain a critical stance on what can be called a ‘medical system’ at all.
I previously published on illness in relation to metaphor, and on recent memoirs of illness, focusing on the narrative in relation to the affective body for the Dutch Review of Books. I am speaker of a research group on the Interfaces between the Life Sciences and the Study of Culture at the GCSC, and was one of the guest editors for a special issue of On_Culture, on Illness and Narrative, which appears in the summer of 2021. Before entering academic work, I worked in the cultural sector, organizing lectures, exhibitions and events around food culture, and the lower senses. Research / teaching interests include philosophy/history of science, or medicine/psychiatry, intersectional feminist theory, affect theory and new materialism.
