Louis van den Hengel

Profile

I am a transdisciplinary scholar exploring the role of contemporary art in fostering a just and caring society. Since 2023, I work at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as Associate Professor of Care Ethics & the Arts and, since September 2024, also as Head of the Department of Care Ethics. I am involved, among other things, in strengthening UvH’s leadership in the field of artistic research through the collaboration Meaningful Artistic Research (MAR) between UvH and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. In addition, I teach in the master’s program Care Ethics and Policy and supervise PhD research—including artistic research—on topics related to, among others, gender and diversity studies, care ethics and aesthetics, cultural analysis, and the environmental humanities. Previously, I was Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. I hold an MA in Classics and a PhD in Gender Studies—both awarded cum laude—from Radboud University Nijmegen. Internationally, I have been a Visiting Scholar at New York University and have held several research residencies at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome.

My research examines the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of contemporary performance and live art, engaging feminist, queer, trans*, decolonial, and ecological perspectives. I explore how performances, particularly by minoritized artists—women and/or queer and trans* persons, specifically those of colour and Indigenous people, as well as a range of nonhuman “others”—can challenge intersecting systems of oppression, create new counterpublic spheres, and cultivate a relational ethics of care oriented toward a more just and sustainable world. My book project, Radical Worlding: Performance and the Ethics of Decreation, brings these concerns into dialogue with the philosophical and mystical thought of Simone Weil. It illuminates how performance, as an embodied and time-based practice, can transform our ways of relating to ourselves, to one another, and to the more-than-human world.

Recent publications include an essay on queer ecopoetics in the journal Textual Practice (2023) and a co-authored contribution to the book Interspecies Performance (Performance Research Books, 2024). Forthcoming work includes a chapter on Marina Abramovic in the book Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (Routledge, 2025), a contribution to the book Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (Valiz, 2026), and an article on what I call trans*species care ethics, based on an artistic research project conducted in collaboration with sociolinguist Leonie Cornips, artist Daniel Hellmann, and the Utrecht-based film collective De Transketeers. Additionally, I am one of the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Artistic Care (with Tatiana Chemi, Anu Mitra, and Fabiola Camuti) to be published in 2027. Finally, I served as lead organiser and curator of the international conference of the Care Ethics Research Consortium on Care, Aesthetics, and Repair in January 2025, which brought together more than 500 scholars, artists, and makers—including over 230 speakers—to explore the intersections of care ethics and the arts (see here and here).