Board
Chair: Ma Pilar Milagros
Mª Pilar Milagros has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Professional Communication with a focus on Cultural Studies. She currently teaches within the BA in English Language and Culture and the Minor Gender and Diversity in Science, Society and Culture. Her areas of research and teaching interest include various rhetoric and cultural-studies related issues, such as representations and social formations of identity markers (gender, sexuality, and ability, among others), discourses of gender roles and gender-based violence, and the power dynamics involved. She has written on cultural violence in political discourse, people’s negotiations of (and resistance to) social identities via language and discourse, and the gender gap in STEM disciplines. She has started working on a new project that examines gender roles and norms as well as gender-based violence in graphic novels.
Board Members:
Ester Jiresch (secretary)
Ester Jiresch (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of European Languages and Cultures and teaches in the University Minor Gender and Diversity in Science, Society and Culture. Her research interests include Swedish culture and literature, comparative literature, cultural transmission and transfer, (trans)gender studies and humor studies.
She is a member of the editorial board of Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek and of the Young ARts Network (YARN).
Rodrigo Gonzalez Alvarez (Media Liaison)
I am a Mexican/Dutch queer lecturer and researcher at the University of Groningen. My activities involve mainly three faculties: University College Groningen (UCG), Faculty of Arts, and Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. I am passionate about conducting top-quality research that improves the lives of marginalized populations, such as LGBTQIA+ youth. As a lecturer, I teach diverse social sciences courses in topics such as gender and diversity, social and cultural psychology, clinical psychology, and research methodologies. Interdisciplinary collaboration applied to solve real-world problems is an integral part of my teaching and research philosophy. I strive for a social and environmental justice approach to science.
Morana Lukač (Treasurer)
Morana Lukač is Assistant Professor in the Chair of European Languages and Cultures. As a sociolinguist, her research focuses on how attitudes and social group membership mould language use. She has published widely in the field of linguistic prescriptivism (Grassroots Prescriptivism, 2018) and she is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism (2023). She has a growing interest in gender-fair language use and linguistic approaches to exploring mental health.
Affiliate Board Members:
Kristin McGee
Kristin McGee is Associate Professor in Popular Music Studies in the Arts, Culture and Media Department. In addition to popular music, she teaches topics related to gender and sexuality within arts cultures. She has written on jazz, gender, popular music, and audiovisual media within a variety of articles and books, including her monographsSome Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) and Remixing European Jazz Culture (Routledge 2019). She co-edited Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Beyoncé in Troubled Times with Christina Baade (Wesleyan University Press, 2021). Current gender and diversity related projects include the Erasmus+ Voices of Women in Music and the Erasmus+ Music4Change project highlighting gender equity and diversity in music education and performance.
Suzanne Manizza Roszak
Suzanne Manizza Roszak is Assistant Professor of Modern English Literature and Culture. She works at the intersection of hemispheric American and global Anglophone literatures, with specializations in gender and diaspora studies, the modern and contemporary Gothic, children's and YA literature, and literary discourses of the more-than-human. Her books include Intersecting Diasporas (SUNY Press 2021), Uncanny Youth (University of Wales Press 2022), and They Also Write for Kids (University Press of Mississippi 2023), as well as the poetry collection Sicilianas (Bordighera Press 2023), which won the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize.
Maryse Helbert
Stacey Copeland
Stacey Copeland is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen and the Co-Director of the international scholarly podcasting initiative, Amplify Podcast Network. Copeland's work on radio and podcast industries, LGBTQ+ media, sound cultures, and feminist theory has been published in a variety of edited collections and top-ranking journals, including Radio Journal , Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and New Media , and the Journal of Popular Music Studies .
Joanna Chojnicka
Joanna Chojnicka is Assistant Professor in Linguistics and English as a Second Language, member of the Language Diversity research group at FoA, and co-founding member of the Gender, Diversity and Inequalities research group at Agricola. Previously, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at Cardiff University in Wales, where she studied gender transition narratives on Polish social media, as well as a postdoctoral fellow in Poznań (Poland), Bremen and Konstanz (Germany). Her research interests include gender, sexuality and discourse studies, multilingualism, translation and minority languages, as well as postcolonial, queer and eco approaches to linguistics.
Gabriela Gallardo Lastra
Gabriela Gallardo Lastra is a decolonial Marxist intersectional feminist and a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and the University of Zacatecas. She currently researches feminist democracy and the time of subordinate women from the epistemology of the South, paying special attention to care work and its alienation. Additionally, she has an interest in the Latin American feminist movement and indigenous women's resistance to extractivism. Thus, her project aims to improve the concept of feminist democracy and Good Living (Sumak Kawsay). Gabriela is also a feminist activist and member of the Groningen Feminist Network.
Claudia Minchilli
Claudia Minchilli is Assistant professor at the Centre for Media and Journalism studies. Her research is positioned in the field of Digital Migration studies, and explores the intersection of migrants' digital practices with social class dynamics from a gender and postcolonial perspective. Her doctoral thesis 'Localizing Digital Diasporas. Diasporic digital networking among Somali, Romanian and Turkish women in Rome through the lens of social class' has been awarded the Ted Meijer prize 2022 by the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) for the best dissertation in the Humanities. She is also editorial coordinator of the Journal of Global Diaspora & Media and member of the Young ARts Network (YARN).
Advisory Board:
Mineke Bosch is Professor of Modern History at the University of Groningen, where she conducts research focused on the history of science, women’s and gender history, international women’s movements, and (auto)biography. The author of An Unwavering Faith in Justice: Aletta Jacobs 1854-1929 and Strijd! De vrouwenkiesrechtbeweging in Nederland, 1882-1922, Dr. Prof. Bosch also previously held positions as Associate Professor in the Centre for Gender and Diversity at the University of Maastricht and as that centre’s special chair in Gender and Science.
Prof. dr. Petra Broomans
Petra Broomans is Associate Professor of European Languages and Cultures. She was the chair of the board of the Center of Gender studies 2005-2020. She is a member of several international associations and treasurer of the Committee of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM). She is the founder and coordinator of the Dutch translators’ dictionary (https://www.vertalerslexicon.nl/), and a series editor of the Studies on Cultural Transfer and Transmission (CTaT). She has published extensively on cultural transfer, the reception of Scandinavian literature and women’s literature. Her research interests include cultural transfer, world literature, meta-literary history, and minority literature. More information can be found at:
www.petrabroomans.net.
Associates:
Donya Ahmadi
Donya Ahmadi is an intersectional feminist scholar and assistant professor of International Relations at the RUG. She teaches an Msc Research Seminar titled 'Race, Class, and Gender Intersectionality' at the department of International Relations and International Organization. Her current research concerns an intersectional and race-critical analysis of the notion of assimilation of Iran's various historically-rooted ethnic groups into a 'centralised' identity, and how this process of assimilation is gendered, class-based and racial, manifested through everyday practices, and fuels migration within and without Iran.
Iris Busschers, MA
Janet Fuller
Janet Fuller is Professor of Language and Society in the European Languages and Cultures program. Her current research focuses on discourses of immigration and integration in Germany and the Netherlands, but she has published on topics such as discourses of food and gender, gendered titles, and construction of gender in a multilingual setting. Her areas of teaching expertise include language, gender and sexuality, and feminist/queer theory and methods. She has also taught the course How to Research Gender and Diversity in the minor Gender and Diversity in Science, Society, and Culture.
Judith Jansma
Judith Jansma works as a lecturer in the department of European Languages and Cultures and teaches in the University Minor Gender and Diversity in Science, Society and Culture. Her research focuses on the multiple ways in which contemporary populism engages with culture and cultural works, more specifically in their conceptualization of the good Self as opposed to an alien Other. In this regard, the notion of gender becomes relevant both in terms of populist support (often simplistically described as “angry white men”) as well as concrete policies advocated by populists that involve the rights of women and/or non-binary people.
Janke Klok
Janke Klok (Henrik-Steffens-professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2014-2018, since then attached to the HU and the University of Groningen) has published widely on Scandinavian literature in the field of gender and intercultural studies. Her PhD dissertation Det norske litterære Feminapolis 1880-1980. Skram, Undset, Sandel og Haslunds byromaner – mot en ny modernistisk genre was published in 2011. Her research interests include the literary arctic, biographical, urban and gender studies. She has translated novels and poetry by classic and contemporary Norwegian authors and is now working on a biography on the Norwegian writer Ebba Haslund. She is engaged in the Erasmus+ project ‘Voices of Women’ (2022-2024) (Universities of Groningen, Tromsø, Stavanger, Osnabrück), the National Library in Oslo project: Made Abroad: Producing Norwegian World Literature in a Time of Rupture, 1900–50 (MAP) (working title) and ‘Experiment Geisteswissenschaft. Exploring academic practices’ and ‘Die Korrespondenz des Naturphilosophen Henrik Steffens (1773-1845) (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin).
Charlotte Knowles
Charlotte Knowles is an Assistant Professor in the department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy. Her primary research areas lie in feminist philosophy and phenomenology, particularly Heidegger and Beauvoir. Her research focusses primarily on complicity in gendered contexts, exploring notions of freedom, responsibility, agency and oppression. In addition to her work on complicity, Charlotte has also published work on testimonial injustice and gendered violence, for which she received the 2020 Robert Papazian essay prize.
Mónica López López
Mónica López López is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. She is particularly interested in understanding the potential causal factors of inequalities in child welfare. She applies an intersectional lens and participatory research methods to understand the impact of multiple forms of oppression in the lives of care-experienced children and youth. Her ultimate goal is to develop scholarship that helps professionals to prioritise equity and social justice in child and family welfare services.
Ksenia Robbe
Ksenia Robbe is a Senior lecturer at the Chair of European Culture and Literature specializing in contemporary Russian literature and visual culture. Her research centers on intersections of postsocialism and postcolonialism, and on politics of memory and temporality. Gender is a key category in her research on inclusive and transformative practices of remembering.
Ruby Schofield
Ruby Schofield is a PhD student currently working in the Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, on an interdisciplinary project funded by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Arts. Her project aims to evaluate and then improve the concept of (women’s) empowerment, in a contribution to the still unresolved tension in feminist philosophy and theory between recognising structural oppression and doing justice to women’s agency under conditions of patriarchy.
Camilla Sutherland
Camilla Sutherland is Assistant Professor in the Chair of European Culture and Literature and Co-Director of the Mexico Study Centre. Her research focuses on gender and Latin American literature and art. She is the author of The Space of Latin American Women Modernists (University of Wales Press, 2024) and Editor-in-Chief of Mistral: Journal of Latin American Women’s Intellectual & Cultural History .
Jeanette den Toonder
Jeanette den Toonder is Senior Lecturer in the department of European Languages and Cultures. Her current research focuses on Iranian Women’s Writing in Europe. This project proposes to move beyond the more mainstream topics that have been examined in relation to exile literature such as homelessness, identity crises and in-betweenness, coming-of-age memoirs and nostalgia, and to adopt an intersectional approach that will enable an examination of the dynamics of empowerment resulting from the recognition of multiple and interlocking influences. Thus, the image of the eroticized Oriental woman being a victim of patriarchal heritage will be replaced by a new model of womanhood reclaiming strength and agency.
Seiki Tanaka
Seiki Tanaka is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations and International Organization. His interest lies in exploring and researching the processes and mechanisms underlying social conflicts and cooperation. In particular, he studies the microfoundations of social diversity and conflicts and how different groups of people—different gender, ethnic, income, and national groups—can co-exist within a society in an era of globalization and technological advancement. More information can be found at www.seikitanaka.com .
Rozemarijn van de Wal
Rozemarijn van de Wal is a PhD student and lecturer in the Department of Modern History. She is also co-coordinator of the university minor on Gender and Diversity in Science, Society and Culture. Her research and teaching focus on gender studies, intersectionality, biography, life-writing and the history of science and she specialises in late Victorian/early Edwardian Britain.
Ryan Wittingslow
Ryan Wittingslow received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2014, and has been with the University of Groningen since 2016. His research sits at the intersection of philosophy of technology, philosophy of art, urban studies, and history and philosophy of science. In addition he has thrice been nominated for, and once won, his faculty's Teacher of the Year award, and has once been nominated for the University Lecturer of the Year.
Marjan Wynia
Marjan Wynia is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School for Humanities at Groningen University. Marjan studies the gender dynamics in the Dutch music industry under the supervision of dr. Kristin McGee and dr. Sara Strandvad. Broadly, Marjan is interested in the working conditions of Dutch women music professionals that work behind the scenes and the gendered career barriers they encounter. Marjan’s work focuses on the working conditions in music in the context of neoliberalism, the Covid pandemic, and the Anthropocene.
| Last modified: | 27 January 2025 2.51 p.m. |