English and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures; Ecocriticism; Travel and Mobility; Life Writing; Bildungsroman; Children’s Writing; Heterotopia; Diaspora; Transculturality.

American & African American literature; American cultural & media history;   Political culture & theory, esp. theories of democracy;  A esthetics; Praxeology;  Critical theory;   American art & architecture;   Popular culture;   Transnational American Studies

Modern literature; feminism; animal studies.

Scandinavian literature, culture, history, dance; cultural transfer and transmission studies; minority literature and culture

Points of interest: Institutional approach to literary history, Editions, Intermedial relations Music and Poetry

I am lecturer in Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen, and PhD candidate in Italian Literature at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University. In 2019 I graduated cum laude from the Research Master’s program in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Groningen (NL); I had previously obtained my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Catania (IT) in 2016, where I started studying Italian literature. In Fall 2018, I was a research intern at the University of Ghent, in Belgium, in the framework of the ERC-funded project “Narrating the Mesh” (NARMESH).

My research focuses on non-anthropocentric conceptualizations of animality and general nonhumanity in Italian modernist literature. I build on Herman’s (2011) remodelling of Modernism through the lens of Enactivism, but instead of looking at themes and contents, I prefer to study the texts through a Neo-Formalist perspective (Levine 2015), meaning that the core of my studies points at the formal narrative innovations produced by Italian Modernism. The aim is to identify the forms used to represent nonhumanity and its relationship with humanity, so to offer new tools to represent them in today’s literature. Accordingly, I employ theories drawn from Posthumanism, Ecocriticism, Animal Studies and New Materialism, so to combine an innovative take on forms and an undertheorized topic such as nonhumanity in Italian literature.

The authors I currently have under examination are Carlo Emilio Gadda and Luigi Pirandello.

Cultural memory; popular culture; modern German literature and culture; culture of the Weimar Republic; intermediality; intertextuality

Alberto Godioli is Associate Professor in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen, and Programme Director of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). He obtained his PhD in 2012 from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa; from 2013 to 2015 he was a Newton International Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

His main research field is humor and satire across media. He has authored the monographs Laughter from Realism to Modernism (Oxford: Legenda / Routledge, 2015) and La scemenza del mondo (Pisa: ETS, 2011, Edinburgh Gadda First Prize), as well as several articles and book chapters on theories and practices of humor from the 18th century to the present.

His current work focuses on humor and free speech jurisprudence, in dialogue with stakeholders such as Columbia Global Freedom of Expression and Cartoonists' Rights Network International. In 2021 he was awarded an NWO Vidi Grant for his project 'Humor in Court' (original title 'Forensic Humor Analysis', 2022-2027). This interdisciplinary project aims to set the basis for a fairer, more consistent approach to humor in legal cases concerning freedom of expression, based on insights coming from humanities-based humor research.

Alberto is also the founder and co-director of the Forum for Humor and the Law (ForHum) and of the OSL research group Literature, Law and Society, as well as the Principal Investigator of the NETIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking project 'Cartoons in Court' (main host: Institute for Advanced Study CEU Budapest, 2020-2023). His research areas also include Modernism, Law and Literature, Posthumanism, Narrative Theory and Cognitive Literary Studies.

Theory of culture; culture and cognition; arts and cognition; arts  and culture education

Literature, Modernism and Women's Travel Writing

Cultural Narratology and Thanatology

French and Francophone culture and literature
Populism in France and the Netherlands
Culture and identity politics
Gender studies

Modern German Literature
Drama
Morality and literature, law and literature
Literary, cultural, and media theory
Literature and music

Narrative and cognitive film theory
Digital Film Forensics / Videographic criticism 
Complex cinema, puzzle films

(European) Crises; Cultural Production in Times of Conflict; Cultural Self-Reflection; Migration and Contemporary Culture
Literature and Film; Literary Theory; Visual Studies; Documentary Film; Film Theory
Sociology; Discourse Theory; Systems Theory
Self-Referentiality; Aesthetic Negativity

Gemma López Canicio is Research Fellow in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen. Her expertise is in narrative research, emphasizing artistic-narrative communication (literature and cinema), fiction, story-telling, and representation from a cognitive sciences and interactive narrative research (videogames) perspective. Currently, she is interested in integrating my narrative research and neuro-cognition research expertise with new interdisciplinary methods and resources valuable to face contemporary social challenges with an international scope.

She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Spanish: Language and Literatures from the University of Alicante and a Master's Degree in Art, Literature and Culture from the Autonomous University of Madrid. In 2016, she was awarded a Collaboration Grant by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport to conduct a study about the limits of fiction in literature. She obtained her PhD in Art, Literature and Culture in 2020 from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) (Cum Laude Distinction and International Mention). Her research was funded from 2017 to 2020 with a research grant provided by the José Luis de Oriol-Catalina de Urquijo Foundation. Gemma carries out multidisciplinary research in Humanities, Literary Theory, Cognitive Sciences, and Communication.

In addition, she is a member of the Communication [Poetics and Rhetoric] Research Group (C [P y R]) and a foundational member of the Spanish Society of Rhetoric [Se-Ret].

Environmental humanities, contemporary Anglophone literature, Victorian literature, novel theory, food studies, literature and science, critical animal studies

Dutch as a second language / Language and Culture

interdisciplinary modernism, modern and contemporary British literature (specializing in the literature of the mid-twentieth century), literature and politics, environmental humanities, the novel

manuscript studies, book history, paleography, codicology, Middle English literature, medieval French literature

Modernism, James Joyce, periodicals, print culture, book history, publishing studies, typography, cultural memory, multilingualism, nationalism, internationalism, transnational phenomena, genre fiction, fanfiction.

Narrative studies and narratology

Internationalisation: International Strategy & Relations.
Qualitative communication support for written and spoken English.
University-wide Language and Culture Policy. Inclusion.
ENLIGHT.

Latin literature of the Late Republic and Early Empire
Literary Theory

grant advice, academic editing, translation, translation studies

I'm interested in digital social reading (how people write and read fiction online) and I use computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods to study how people read.

I'm Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project GOLEM (Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models).

I'm also a member of the scientific advisory board of OPERAS (the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area) and Vice President of IGEL (the International Society of the Empirical Study of Literature).

Comics studies, narrative theory, word and image

Classical Receptions; Classics; Cultural History; Art History

Contemporary Russian literature and art
Postcolonial literatures and theory
Memory studies
Postsocialist and postcolonial studies
South African literature and culture

U.S. Literature and Culture (1900-present); Sociological and Institutional approaches; Creative and reproductive labor; Artist communities; Podcasts

Nederlandse literatuur van de twintigste en eenentwintigste eeuw in internationale context; literatuur- en cultuurtheorie

postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, memory studies, life writing, Middle East studies

J.D. Schnepf's current research focuses on the literature and culture of the US security state, surveillance technologies, extractive infrastructures, domestic labor, and the War on Terror. Her writing has appeared and is forthcoming in academic journals including American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Feminist Media Studies, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Media + Environment, Modern Fiction Studies, Museum Anthropology, Review of International American Studies, Surveillance & Society, and American Literary History: Online Review. In addition, she has essays in the digital humanities volume titled, Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor (Routledge), and in the forthcoming collections, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology (Open Humanities) and The Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature in English (Routledge). Schnepf is currently at work on a book project that traces the relationship between militarized drones that maintain US imperialism overseas and cultural representations of femininity and domesticity at home. She edited a journal issue titled "Gender and Surveillance" with Dr Molly Geidel for Review of International American Studies (RIAS) (Spring/Summer 2022).

In 2019, she was awarded two competitive prizes from international and national academic associations: the Emory Elliott Prize by the International American Studies Association (IASA) at the IX IASA World Congress and the Amy J. Elias Founder's Award by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP). Her research has been supported by institutions including Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University,  The English Institute, the American Association of Geographers, the Huntington Library, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. 

Schnepf offers courses and supervises graduate work in the areas of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American studies, literature, gender and women’s studies, STS, and surveillance studies. Recent courses include "Domestic Cultures of US Imperialism"; “Computers and US Culture”; “Domestic Disturbances”; “Reading Minds”; and “Imagining Media.”

Before joining the Groningen faculty, Schnepf was the 2019-2020 Postdoctoral Associate for the Project on Gender in the Global Community (GGC) Seminar "Gender and Security" at Princeton University and a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program. She also mentored first-generation, low-income students as a SIFP Faculty Fellow. Prior to her Princeton lectureship, she served as a Lecturer in the History & Literature concentration at Harvard University where she also co-directed the Novel Theory Across the Disciplines seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Brown University.

Pablo Valdivia is Chair-Full Professor of European Culture and Literature (University of Groningen), Accreditated Full Professor [Catedrático Universidad] of Arts and Humanities (ANECA, Spain), Associate in Applied Physics at Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Harvard University), Academic Director of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL), Scientific Advisor of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities and the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIAS-KNAW), Coordinator Research Theme Group Data Science, Culture & Social Change at Research Centre for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics (DemCP, RUG), Co-Editor of the Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies and Research Fellow "Corpus Ex Machina" Research Group Incubator (UdeA). Before joining the University of Groningen in 2016, he worked at the University of Amsterdam, The Cambridge Foundation Villiers Park and the University of Nottingham. He holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Granada (Spain) and a BA in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Valladolid (Spain). He obtained a Research MA degree in "Research in European Literature and Theatre" awarded by UNED (Spain). In 2007, he received his PhD degree in "Philosophy of Hispanic Studies" at the University of Nottingham. 

His research deals primarily with the "Humanities", "Social Sciences", "Communication", "Computational Literary Studies", "Cultural Analytics" and "Technology", and the notions of "Culture, Literature and Crisis" from a multidisciplinary transnational perspective. He is an expert on "Cultural Narratives" and "Conceptual Metaphors". He carries out multidisciplinary research with particular emphasis on Digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, University Innovation, Data Science, Applied Physics, Social Sciences and Cognitive Sciences.

Professor Valdivia is a reviewer and editor of more than a dozen international top scientific journals and book series; the leading researcher of ConnectU in the Erasmus+ INNOVALAB project (European Commission) and an expert reviewer and independent rapporteur of European Commission research projects, among many other international scientific activities and recognitions (see CV). Besides, he regularly advises governments worldwide on Research, Educational Innovation, Higher Education, Science, Technology and Social Affairs.

From 2014 to 2018, Valdivia was President of the Steering Committee of the H2020 European Commission Excellent Science Marie Curie RISE project "Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal (CRIC)" project; from 2016 to 2018 he was Director of the "Research Centre Arts in Society" (AiS University of Groningen), and he founded, in 2019, the "Research Centre for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics" (DemCP University of Groningen). From 2017 to 2018, Valdivia was Finance Officer CLLiP Programmes (Cultures, Literatures, Linguistics, Politics). In 2018, Prof. Dr Pablo Valdivia was awarded "Lecturer of the Year" Faculty of Arts (University of Groningen). From 2020 to 2022, Professor Valdivia was a Fellow in University Innovation at LASPAU (affiliated with Harvard University). In 2022, LASPAU (affiliated with Harvard University) received the PIEoneer Global Award for the Best Public/Private Partnership under the Program "Innovation in Teaching" to which Professor Valdivia contributed throughout his LASPAU Fellowship.

Currently, Valdivia supervises 13 PhD and 3 Postdoc research projects. 

IMPORTANT!! I DO NOT ACCEPT NEW PHD CANDIDATES. MY SUPERVISION CAPACITY IS FULLY BOOKED FOR 2023 AND 2024! PLEASE, DO NOT CONTACT ME IF YOU WANT TO DO A PHD WITH ME UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2025! THANKS FOR YOUR COLLABORATION!!!

Current PhD Supervision
PhD Candidate Melissa Luypaers, 'Humor, Discrimination and Free Speech Jurisprudence: A Law-and-Humanities Approach'. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Alberto Godioli daily supervisor.

PhD Candidate Bianca Ramírez, ‘Yo sentía que no estábamos solos. Sensorial Perception and its Role in the Experience of Former Detenidos-Desaparecidos’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor, Dr Florian Lippert, Dr Konstantin Mierau and Dr Ksenia Robbe daily supervisors.

PhD Candidate Alessandro di Laurentis, ‘Personaggio, interiorita e tragico nelle novelle di Tozzi e Pirandello’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Alberto Godioli daily supervisor.

PhD Candidate Beer Prakken, 'Not Just a Joke: On Humour, Polarisation and Responsibility'. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia and Professor Dr Bart Streumer main supervisors, Dr Daphne Brandenburg and Dr Alberto Godioli daily supervisors.

PhD Candidate María Isabel Marín, 'Can an AI-Enabled System Help Us Understand How Cultural Narratives Are Configured and How Do They Prime Social Mobilization? A Machine Learning Model for Automatic Detection of the Regime(s) of Conceptual Metaphor'. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Macr Esteve del Valle daily supervisor.

PhD Candidate Teun Joshua Brandt, 'Symbiotic Narratives: Contested Agencies in Scientific and Literary Accounts of Human Holobiants'. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor, Dr Florian Lippert, Dr Vera Alexander and Dr Fred Keijzer daily supervisors.

PhD Candidate Rosmery-Ann Boegeholz, ‘The ‘Mirror Syndrome’ as a response to the Beauty Influencers on Instagram: Problems and Effects of the excessive use of images by young university women’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Marc Esteve del Valle and Dr Javier Muñoz Basols daily supervisors.

PhD Candidate Juan Gallego  Benot, 'How did rhetorical invention in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation shape a conflicting idea of Modernity? An analysis of the discursive construction of a new European society'. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia and Professor Dr Tomás Albaladejo main supervisors and Dr Alberto Godioli daily supervisor. 

PhD Candidate Gonzalo Albornoz, ‘Fictional Representations of Law, Legality and Justice in Popular Mass Media and the Construction of Legal Knowledge by Key Communities in the Prison Environment’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Konstantin Mierau daily supervisor.

PhD Candidate Elizabeth Duarte, ‘Twittering for Peace? The Construction of Meaning and Otherness in Digital Media representations of the Colombian Peace Process’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Konstantin Mierau daily supervisor. 

PhD Candidate Rose Smith, ‘Identifying the Role of Museums in Central European Post-Communist Nations in the Construction of the Global Memory of Communism’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Ksenia Robbe daily supervisor. 

PhD Candidate Klára Kosova, ‘The Role of Economic Elites in the Foreign Policy-Making Process: The Case of Bulgaria’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Lisa Gaufman daily supervisor. 

PhD Candidate Leonardo Arriagada, ‘CG-Art. An aesthetic discussion of the relationship between artistic creativity and computation’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor, Dr Florian Lippert and Dr Alberto Godioli daily supervisors.


Current Post-Doc Supervision
Dr Matteo Fiori, 'Humour in Court' (NWO VIDI Grant, 2022-2027, PI Dr Alberto Godioli). Prof Dr Pablo Valdivia and Dr Alberto Godioli supervisors.

Dr Jennifer Young, 'Humour in Court (NWO VIDI Grant, 2022-2027, PI Dr Alberto Godioli). Prof Dr Pablo Valdivia and Dr Alberto Godioli supervisors.

Dr Dimitris Soudias, 'Welfare Visions 2.0: Future-Making Practices in the Social Economies of Amsterdam, Athens and Berlin'. Prof Dr Pablo Valdivia and Dr Florian Lippert supervisors.


Completed PhD Supervision and Postdoc
PhD Ruby de Vos, ‘Living with Toxicity: Mapping the Toxic in Contemporary Culture’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Vera Alexander daily supervisor.

PhD Judith Jansma, ‘From Submission to Soumission: Populists’ perspectives on culture’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor, Professor Dr Lars Rensmann and Dr Alberto Godioli daily supervisors.

PhD Juan del Valle, ‘Imagining the Unpredictable: Communication, Power and Technology in José Ricardo Morales’ Transnational Theatre’. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor and Dr Konstantin Mierau daily supervisor. 

PhD Cristian Crusat, ‘La construction de la biographie imaginaire’. Professor Ieme van der Poel (University of Amsterdam) and Dr Pablo Valdivia (University of Amsterdam) co-supervisors.

PhD David Martínez Antón, ‘La teoría de la transducción literaria. Hacia una teoría dialógica de la obra literaria’. Professor Tomás Albaladejo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Dr Pablo Valdivia (University of Amsterdam) co-supervisors.

Dr Omar Alcántara, 'Adolescence, Gender and Violence in the Bildungsroman and the Road movies: from Goethe to Alfonso Cuarón'. Professor Dr Pablo Valdivia main supervisor.

Vera Veldhuizen is assistant professor in both European Languages and Cultures, and Arts, Media, Culture at the University of Groningen. Previously she attended Cambridge University for her PhD in children's literature, with Homerton College and the Faculty of Education, supervised by Maria Nikolajeva. She holds a BA from  University College Roosevelt and an MSc in Literature and Society from Edinburgh University.

Her research is focused on cognitive approaches to children's literature. Her PhD was on empathy, ethics and justice construction children's war literature. Her current project is on the impact and complexity of contrasting truth narratives in children's literature. She has presented her research at many international conferences and through several peer reviewed publications.

Visser is a member of the Dutch Literary Society (Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde); member of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen); member of the Deutscher Germanistenverband-Gesellschaft für Hochschulgermanistik and member of the Netherlands Graduate School for Literary Studies (OSL).

Institutional Approach to Dutch Modern Literature, professionalization and internationalisation of the literary Field, reading Culture and book Science.

toxicity, ecocriticism, time studies, nuclear aesthetics, cultural analysis, the body

Oscar Wilde
Victorian Literature and Culture
Neo-Victorian Literatre / contemporary appropriations of 19th century literature
Literary Theory
Postmodernism
Word and Music Studies

Postcolonial European identity, South African literature, the literary field and the public sphere. Transnational cultural production. Interdisciplinary project-based education.

Film & Media Studies | Narrative Studies & Narratology | Arts & Cognition | Empirical Aesthetics|

Lord Byron, British Romanticism, English-Language Romanticism, European Romanticism, Reader Response Theory, Aesthetic Philosophy, the Sublime, Affect, Welsh Language/Cymraeg, Celtic Studies, Gothic Literature, Ecocriticism, Fantasy, Creative Writing

Satire, Humor, Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, Identity