Introducing New Member: Eliza Steinbock

Dr Eliza Steinbock has joined FASoS as Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies within the Literature and Art department. They are an affiliated researcher of the Centre for Gender and Diversity and also to MACCH. Eliza specializes in the study of visuality and material culture, focusing on questions of transgender cultural production and the intersectional analysis of inclusion/exclusion mechanisms.

Eliza's intersectional research vision is anchored into the national consortium project that they lead of fifteen plus Dutch partners, “The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking & Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces” (NWO-Creative Industries, 2020-2025). The program experiments with different formats to generate collaboration between scholarly, activist, public, and private partners who conduct Decolonising, Queering, and Cripping cultural activism. Activities involve sharing, assessing, and developing intersectional approaches that dismantle exclusionary thinking, practices, as well as policy. Eliza's research focuses on not who is simply present in heritage spaces, but who activates the space and how ‘difficult’ or contested materials are handled in the art and archival heritage worlds. Eliza's hired PhD students on this project, Noah Littel and Liang-kai Yu, are also now at FASoS and in MACCH.

Developing out of their Archival Interactions work package in the Critical Visitor, Eliza is developing a research proposal that puts critical archival studies into conversation with transgender artistic and culture production. This research program investigates how art and cultural production serves trans people, communities, and scholarship as intimate and political sources of history (re)making. Departing from the notion that art is an active supplement to social movements, Eliza proposes that cultural artifacts should be studied as archival records, even if, and especially if, their forms of evidence presentation consist in ephemera that challenge the traditional norms for what counts as solid evidence, a reliable source, or a 'true' document. It asks, How can consulting the sources of our creative transcestors produce a revelatory vision of historical consciousness? It seeks to devise a syncretic set of affective methods for the analysis, diagnosis and critique of art and cultural production as archives of feeling.  Eliza would be happy to co-host a reading group or focused event on the topic of critical archive studies with anyone interested – shoot them an email (e.steinbock@maastrichtuniversity.nl).