(Annette-Carina) AC van der Zaag

Biography

Annette-Carina van der Zaag is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities. She also works as an adjunct Assistant Professor at Smith College (MA Social Work), Massachusetts, where she teaches an elective in practice research and arts-based methodology. She is a tutor at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, in the Critical Studies Department where she teaches the seminar in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She studied Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and then moved to London where she lived for 15 years. She holds an MA (2006) and PhD (2013) in Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London. Before coming to EUC she worked as a Lecturer in the Psychosocial Studies Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests centre around the materiality of bodies as socio-historic and cultural sites of power, transformation and rupture. Theoretically, her work is situated at the intersections of feminist/queer/trans* theory, black studies and posthumanism. She is interested in interrogating what it means to be human, how such an entity is constructed and might be constructed differently for more liveable futures – often with particular attention to pandemic lifeworlds and biomedical HIV prevention methods and processes. Alongside her scholarly practice, she worked as a custom corsetier and costumer with her own label for over 10 years and has recently made the shift from commission-based work to art practice. She is interested in reshaping embodied experience through textile and sculpture techniques and is currently focussing on practice research as a way to combine academic research and art practice.