معرفی
Clara Vlessing is an Affiliate Researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) within Utrecht University's Humanities faculty, specializing in Modern and Contemporary Literature. She has served as a lecturer at Utrecht University since 2018 and completed her PhD in June 2023 as part of the ERC-project 'Remembering Activism.' In 2024, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO NWA-ORC project 'Heritages of Hunger' at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Vlessing currently holds leadership roles including co-chair of the Memory Studies Association's Memory and Activism Working Group, and has previously held organizational positions with the International Auto/biography Association and Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies.
Her research focuses on the intersection of memory studies, social movements, and gender, with particular expertise in the cultural remembrance of radical women. Vlessing's work examines how revolutionary figures like Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Sylvia Pankhurst are remembered and mobilized in contemporary contexts. Her methodological approach combines literary and cultural analysis across media with theoretical frameworks from memory studies, decolonization theory, and gender studies. She also engages with creative writing practices as both subject and methodology in her scholarly work.
Vlessing's publication record demonstrates consistent scholarly output through 2025, with recent contributions spanning book chapters, journal articles, and edited collections. Her work shows a clear trajectory from examining specific revolutionary figures to broader theoretical questions about reparative remembrance and the mobilization of activist legacies. The publications reveal growing engagement with visual culture and comics as memory sites, alongside continued focus on life writing and feminist memory practices. Her research increasingly addresses how scarcity in visual memory shapes commemorative practices for marginalized historical figures.
Vlessing has been actively involved in teaching literary and cultural analysis, theories of memory, decolonization and gender, and both creative and academic writing. Her organizational work with professional associations demonstrates commitment to building scholarly communities around memory studies and life writing. She is currently developing a monograph titled 'Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst' for De Gruyter's series on Media and Cultural Memory Studies.
