I am driven by curiosity and like to do research into things that fascinate me, as well as support excellent research. The combination of both conducting research and supporting great research in the field of the Humanities, creating opportunities for new research projects, make me feel that I can live out my ambition to drive forward our understanding of ourselves and the culture and world we live in.
Research Management
In my daily work, I work as a Research Support Officer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Here I am supporting researchers with the full life cycle of their projects, from finding the right call to submit their project ideas to, to giving grant advice and supporting the writing process of the grant applications (including editing) and the project management of successful projects. Next to this, I also concern myself with more strategic research topics, such as the development of a funding and research strategy for the institute.
I am an active member of the Dutch association for RMAs, ARMA-NL, and also of the European association of RMAs, EARMA. At the EARMA conference of 2024, I hosted a 15 minute discussion table on the connection between research support and research and how RMAs position themselves in the academic field.
However, most importantly: RMAs like to dance. I do so too. A lot.
Research
My main research interests are the ‘roaring’ 1920s, in particular the Weimar Republic, popular culture, the connection between literature and music, intertextuality and intermediality.
I am trained as a literary scholar, although I have always been interested in more media than just literature. After studying the function of Schlager texts and urban sounds in Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the question whether the Schlager of the 1920s is capable of more than just being entertainment, like for example serving as a critical reflection of its time, I returned to the reason why I got fascinated by the 1920s in the first place, namely their image of being ‘golden’, ‘roaring’ and ‘wild’. This image for me has been largely shaped by contemporary popular culture, and I wanted to understand how this image is created.
In my PhD research, I therefore take a look at popular media like Krimis (literature), television series (Babylon Berlin), music and other media to investigate what image contemporary German popular culture creates of the 1920s. I want to find out how popular culture is currently reimagining the 1920s, what image is created and what that image communicates about the 1920s. My dissertation therefore sets out to explore what we currently perceive or imagine that the 1920s must have been like, or maybe even, what they should have been like. How do the different media in contemporary German popular culture construct an imaginary, transmedia world out of the Berlin of the 1920s? What elements, clichés, symbols and spaces are used? And what Weimar does it represent?
This project, with the working title The 1920s revisited: The cultural memory of 1920s Berlin in contemporary popular culture, is supervised by Prof. Thony Visser (Groningen) and Dr. Johannes Müller (Leiden).