dr. Andries Hiskes
Assistant Professor
I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in literary and cultural studies, specializing in aesthetics, affect theory, and disability studies. Since February 2025, I have been working as an assistant professor in the Care Ethics department at the University of Humanistic Studies. Previously, I worked as a Principal Lecturer Inclusion & Participation in the Nursing program at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. There I taught in areas including narrative medicine, participatory healthcare, and disability studies. I also developed, together with Tom Maassen, the minor The Art of Caring, in which students from various art academies collaborated with students from healthcare programs (nursing, dermatology, nutrition and dietetics) around the theme of 'care'.
After obtaining a master's degree in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at Leiden University, I received a PhD research grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2018 as part of the Doctoral Grant for Teachers program. My doctoral research at Leiden University examined the relationship between affect, aesthetics, and the legibility of disability. I analyzed how cultural texts and artifacts influence our perception and interpretation of disabled bodies and how these bodies in turn undermine and reconfigure existing representational practices. During my doctoral research, I was a fellow at The Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.
I am co-initiator and organizer of The Politics of Disablement Summer School, part of the international Utrecht Summer School at the UvH. I have given presentations and workshops at universities across Europe, including Stockholm, Budapest, Rome, Aarhus, Limerick, Mälardalen, Utrecht, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and Karlstad, and in the United States, including Chicago, Boston, and Ithaca. Within Leiden University, I was involved with the LUCAS PhD Council, the editorial board of the LUCAS Graduate Journal, and the LUCAS Impact Committee, where I worked on the valorization of academic research. Additionally, I am a member of the Creative-Critical Approaches to the Health Humanities consortium, which received an Incubator Grant from the Dutch Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) in 2023. In 2025, I received the 'Best Thesis Award' from OSL for my dissertation, Disability and Its Affective Affordances.
In the coming years, I will contribute to the further development of care-ethical and -aesthetic, cultural analytical, and artistic research at the UvH. In this context, I am involved in the collaboration between the UvH and the University of Arts Utrecht (HKU) around Meaningful Artistic Research. Potential collaborations with prospective PhD candidates, postdocs, and other researchers interested in these themes are most welcome.
During my doctoral research at Leiden University (Disability and Its Affective Affordances: Deformity, Decay, Disruption, Distortion), I investigated how cultural texts and artworks shape our reading and interpretation practices around the disabled body. Central to this research was the relationship between affect, aesthetics, and the legibility of disability: how is disability represented, how does it evoke affective responses, and how do these responses influence the way we perceive and interpret it?
My research proposed that disability is not merely an object of representation, but actively undermines the norms and structures of representation, perception, and agency. I examined this through four core concepts closely associated with disability in aesthetic and cultural discourses: deformity, decay, disruption, and distortion. Each of these concepts functions as a lens to analyze how disability challenges expectations surrounding visual recognizability, agency, and representation.
Through the close reading of literary texts and other artworks, I elucidated how affective responsivity plays a crucial role in the process of aesthetic appreciation and interpretation. Disability functions not only as a deviation from normative aesthetic frameworks but as a force that compels us to fundamentally reconsider these frameworks. My research thus contributed to the broader fields of disability studies, affect theory, and aesthetics by approaching disability not merely as a social or medical phenomenon, but also as a phenomenon that poses an aesthetic question.
In my current research, I focus on the relationship between diversity in bodily capacity and how we culturally "translate" this into social and political representation. Disability raises the question concerning to what extent the normativity associated with representation excludes people who do not meet its implicit requirements. I investigate how disability forces us to consider representation not as a self-evident or conclusive process. I explore how people who cannot conform to normative representational practices nevertheless influence and transform cultural, political, and aesthetic structures.
Peer reviewed:
- Hiskes, A.R. (2024) Affects as Affordances: Disability and the Genres of the Actionable.
Frontiers in Sociology: Sociology of Emotion.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1410248/abstract
- Hiskes A.R. (2024) This is Only Delay: The Celebratory Epideictic and the Act-Like in Mary
Szybist’s Annunciations. FRAME: Journal of Literary Studies.
www.frameliteraryjournal.com/37-1-get-lit-a-celebration-issue/37-1-andries-hiskes/
- Hiskes A.R. & Shimon O.B. (2022), Stuck together: a Correspondence on Protocols between
Scholars and Objects. Somatechnics 12(3): 185-199 (4). Open Access available via
scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A3502394/view
- Hiskes A.R. (2022) Een sprekende poëzie: affectieve ascese in het werk van Jeroen Mettes. In
Buijs S., Ieven B. (eds.) Vluchtlijnen van de poëzie. SEL-Reeks no. 16 Gent: Academia Press.
179-194. Open Access available via
scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/3283706
- Hiskes A.R. (2021) Semblances of intimacy: separating the humane from the human through
reading Blade Runner 2049. Journal of Posthuman Studies 5(1): 19-38. Open Access available
via scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A3214559/view
- Hiskes A.R. (2020), Prosthetic performatives: reading disability’s discomfort through emotives
and affect patterns in ‘Jane Eyre’. Textual Practice 35(12): 1941-1956. Open Access available
via: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2020.1786717
- Hiskes A.R. (2019), The Affective Affordances of Disability, Digressions: Amsterdam Journal of
Critical Theory, Cultural Analysis, and Creative Writing 3(2): 5-17. Open Access available via:
scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2909087/view
- Hiskes A.R. (2019), Disabling Language and the Nuances of Stigmatization, American Journal of
Bioethics Neuroscience 10(2): 94-96. Open Acces available via:
scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2910308/view
- Hiskes A.R. (2017), Grotesque Genius: The Aesthetics of Form and Affect in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. In: Boletsi M., Sage T. (Eds.) Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild:
Encounters in the Arts and Contemporary Politics. Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race
no. 32 Leiden and Boston: Brill. 165–179.
Research Portal University of Humanistic Studies