Andries Hiskes

Profile

I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in literary and cultural studies and am affiliated with the Care Ethics department as an assistant professor. In this capacity, I study how art and culture address the ways in which disabled bodies affect other bodies and how disabled bodies are culturally interpreted. I also examine how disability calls into question dominant forms of perception, representation, and agency.

In 2026, I was awarded a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for my project Agonistic Bodies: How Disability Art Reshapes Disability Politics. In this project, I examine how art and protest concerning disability develop new forms of political action. Because political participation is commonly based on norms such as autonomy, self-control, intelligibility, and purposive action, the concept of the body underlying these norms often remains unexamined, as does the way in which this concept determines what is recognised and acknowledged as political action. I investigate how art and protest disrupt such norms, enable new forms of action, and challenge the aesthetic and bodily conditions of ‘the political’ itself.

My Veni project builds on my doctoral research at Leiden University. In my dissertation, Disability and Its Affective Affordances: Deformity, Decay, Disruption, Distortion, I examined how literary texts and other works of art shape our perception and interpretation of disabled bodies. The project centred on the relationship between affect, aesthetics, and the cultural legibility of disability. I argue that when disabled bodies affect other bodies because they are culturally difficult to ‘read’ or interpret, this affords aesthetic judgements about those bodies, allowing people to find a way to relate to them. In 2025, the dissertation received the Best Thesis Award from the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL).

At the University of Humanistic Studies, I am involved in the collaboration with the University of Arts Utrecht on Meaningful Artistic Research. I am also co-coordinator of the Medical and Health Humanities research group within OSL. In addition, I am a member of the Historical College of the Museum of Nursing.

I welcome contact with prospective doctoral researchers as well as other researchers working in disability studies, affect theory, aesthetics, art and politics, artistic research, or literary and cultural studies.