Dr. Louis v.den Hengel

I am a transdisciplinary scholar with a track record of developing research and teaching at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophy, and feminist, queer, decolonial, and ecological approaches to social and planetary justice. In September 2023, I was appointed as Associate Professor of Care Ethics & the Arts at the University of Humanistic Studies (UvH) in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Before coming to Utrecht, I worked as an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Literature and Art at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University.

I combine a background in classical humanistic studies with a critical, community-based outlook that aims to respond to -- and resist -- historical and contemporary structures of power, privilege, and oppression. After obtaining an MA in Classics (cum laude), I specialized in the interdisciplinary field of gender studies with a particular focus on feminist philosophies of materiality, embodiment, and subjectivity. I received my PhD in Gender Studies (cum laude) from the Institute for Gender Studies and the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University Nijmegen in 2009. In the same year, my monograph Imago on Roman imperial sculpture and the embodiment of gender was published, which was awarded the Jan van Gelderprijs by the Association of Dutch Art Historians. Internationally, I have held various residencies at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome and I was Visiting Scholar at New York University in the spring of 2010.

In the coming years, I will help expand the UvH's leadership in artistic, arts-based and practice-led research by developing and supervising research on care ethics, aesthetics, and the arts in relation to normative societal concerns. In this context, I contribute, among others, to the collaboration between the UvH and the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht called Meaningful Artistic Research and the International Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC). I welcome expressions of interest from potential PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and others keen on working with us on these and related topics.

My research examines the sociopolitical and ethical value of contemporary performance and live art from feminist, queer ecological, and decolonial perspectives. My interest lies in how makers -- especially those from minoritized groups, such as women, queer and trans* persons, specifically those of colour and indigenous people, as well as a range of nonhuman “others” -- use performance and performative creative processes to resist oppressive regimes of power and knowledge, to construct new counterpublic spheres, and to articulate a relational ethics of care in the name of an equitable, peaceful, and just sustainable future.

My current book project Radical Worlding: Performance and the Ethics of Decreation brings the above perspectives into conversation with the philosophical and mystical thinking of Simone Weil (1909-1943) to shed new light on the interrelations between twenty-first century performance and the cultural politics of gender, sexuality, race, class, and species difference. In doing so, I focus on the change that performance -- as an embodied and time-based art form and as a caring practice of worldmaking -- can foster in the ways humans relate to themselves, to one another, and to the more-than-human world.

I supervise BA, MA, and PhD research, including artistic research, on diverse topics in the fields of gender and diversity studies, care ethics and aesthetics, cultural analysis, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and more.

My scholarly work has been published in journals such as Textual Practice; Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts; International Journal of Language and Culture; Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly; and the Dutch Journal of Gender Studies. I also have contributed book chapters to edited volumes such as Entanglements and Weavings: Diffractive Approaches to Gender and Love (Brill, 2021); Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene (Springer, 2022); the Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality and Culture (Routledge, 2022); and Interspecies Performance (Performance Research Books, 2024).

Publications
Research Portal University of Humanistic Studies