Project Team and Projects
Ann Rigney, professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and founder of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, is the principal investigator and project leader of ReACt. Personal site: www.rigney.nl. Besides coordinating ReAct as a whole she is working on specific subprojects and on a synthetic monograph provisionally titled “The Cultural Memory of Hope.” (Jan 2019-June 2024)
Lisa van Straten is ReAct’s project assistant and the general point of contact with regard to practical and organizational matters. (October 2022-June 2024)
Emilia Salvanou is a post-doctoral researcher in the ReAct project. She is exploring the memoryscapes of youth movements in the 1960s with special attention to Greece and West Germany. (February 2019 – January 2021)
Thomas Smits is a post-doctoral researcher in the ReAct project. He focuses on how images shape the memory of activism and memory in activism. He hopes to demonstrate that newly-developed ‘distant viewing’ techniques can shed new light on these two important aspects of the memory-activism nexus. (March 2019 – March 2021)
Tashina Blom is a PhD candidate in the ReAct project. Her research falls within the project’s research strand ‘memoryscapes of activism’. It explores how historical protest slogans used in contemporary movements have become carriers of cultural memory, tracing how certain slogans have accrued memory across time, and analysing how those memories are mobilised, adapted, challenged, and even appropriated for political purposes. (February 2019-March 2024)
Duygu Erbil is a PhD candidate in the ReAct project. Her project explores the cultural afterlife of Deniz Gezmiş and how this student leader and activist has been remembered in Turkey since his execution in 1972. (September 2019-December 2023)
Clara Vlessing is a PhD candidate in the ReAct project. Her research focuses on individual women activists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how they have been remembered in changing contexts over several generations. (February 2019-January 2023)
Sophie van den Elzen is a post-doctoral researcher in the ReAct project. Her research develops the idea of a “protest lexicon” or “linguistic repertoire” and explores how activist memory is shaped and transmitted through language. (April 2021-March 2023)
Anna Stibbe is a former intern and current student assistant in the ReAct project. As such, she works on the collective database of the project. (March 2022-July 2022; October 2022-January 2023)
Marit van de Warenburg worked as an intern and assistant for the ReAct project and focused in her research primarily on the interplay between memory and protest music. (April 2021-December 2021; March 2022-April 2022)
África López Zabalegui is a former research intern and a current student assistant in the ReAct project. Her research focuses on the remembrance of the Spanish anti-austerity movement. She was also responsible for making video presentations of the ReAct research. (September 2022-June 2023)