Research

Jeroen Boom is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at the department of Cultural Studies. His research focuses on how contemporary visual culture – ranging from documentaries to digital videos – shapes the visibility of humanitarian and ecological violence. He has worked on images of border violence, visualizations of liquid violence, and is currently working on a project on war fatigue. He co-founded the research group Critical Humanities and is currently co-coordinating the research group Media, Popular Culture, and Social Change. He is teaching the course Visual Media in Times of Crisis in the master Creative Industries. 

Vincent Meelberg’s research focuses on the relation between musical practices, technology, and creativity. He addresses questions such as how technological developments influence the way music is made, distributed, and listened to, how ideas regarding creativity have changed as a result of these developments, and what possibilities music technology offers to stimulate musical creativity.

Edwin van Meerkerk looks at the way participation and education in arts and culture is organized and legitimized. His research looks at professional identity, interaction, and assumptions about the effects of cultural participation, both in cultural institutions and in schools. He takes a critical, discursive approach to the concept of cultural entrepreneurship, focusing on the relationship between makers, institutions, audiences and policy makers.

László Munteán is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies whose research focuses on intersections of cultural memory, heritage, and the built environment. For more than a decade, he was coordinator of the RICH research group 'Memory, Materiality, Affect' (MMA). He is now the Faculty coordinator of the national sector plan theme 'Cultural Heritage and Identity'. Drawing on diverse theoretical apparatuses, his publications have focused on the memorialization of 9/11 in literature and the visual arts, on American cities and architecture, and on the architectural heritage of Budapest. In a broader sense, his scholarly work centers on the intersection of memory, heritage, visual culture, and architecture in North American and Eastern European contexts.

Melanie Schiller is Professor of Contemporary Media Cultures. She is a cultural and media scholar focused on popular culture, music and politics. Schiller examines how music shapes collective identity and political meaning. She explores how music and aesthetic choices shape political ideas and forms of protest, and how they influence public debate, particularly in right‑wing populist contexts. She co-leads the RICH-research group Media, Popular Culture, and Social Change and is member of the Sustainable Democracy Hot Spot. Schiller teaches courses in cultural theory, popular music, conspiracy culture and research methods, and supervises theses and dissertations on popular culture, music, and politics.