I am an assistant professor of Modern Dutch Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. I am a series editor of Experimental Practices: Encounters across Arts, Sciences and Humanities and coordinator of the research group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures  at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). I served as managing director of the The Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) and was a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in 2020-21.

My current research project "Patterns: Exploring a 21st Century Figure of Knowledge" focuses on the fascination with patterns in present-day human and social sciences (such as cognitive science). The project explores the emergence of 'pattern' as a figure of knowledge and its conceptual, discursive and aesthetic implications in the work of writers such as Tom McCarthy and Octavia Butler, researchers and critics such as Caroline Levine, Andy Clark and Luciana Parisi and artists such as Ryoji Ikeda and Yukultji Napangati.

The monograph Pathographie der Tropen: Literatur, Medizin und Kolonialismus um 1900 explores the representation of the tropics as a space of disease and madness in German colonial culture (tropical medicine, literature and politics).   

My research interests include:

• neuroculture and cognitive literary studies (How Patterns Meet: Tracing the Isomorphic Imagination in Contemporary Neuroculture)
• literature, psychopathology and neurodiversity (Mixing Repertoires: Cerebral Subjects in Contemporary Dutch Fiction)
• literary representations of labor and creativity (Narrating General Performance)
• contemporary Dutch fiction (Male Identity, Space and Globalization in Eggers and Grunberg)

I welcome PhD proposals in these fields.