Maaike Hommes is currently working on her PhD in cultural analysis of unexplained illness at the GCSC in Giessen Germany, under supervision of prof. Greta Olson (JLU, Giessen) and prof. Frans Willem Korsten (Leiden University). She is based in Amsterdam and teaches film and literary studies and gender studies.

More information about Maaike Hommes

Maaike Hommes has a background in history, philosophy, and cultural analysis and currently teaches film and literary studies and gender studies. 

Maaike’s main research interests are relationality and critical embodiment. More specifically this translates into a range of interdisciplinary research fields such as film studies and literature, materialist feminist theory, affect theory and queer studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine and psychiatry. 

Her dissertation traces different routes along which understanding of unexplained illness travels. This dissertation looks at cultural objects such as film, illness memoir, and illness memes and reads these next to medical texts to focus attention on how unexplained illness has a formative effect on the experience of symptoms in the body. She is currently working on an accessible version that translates the work of her dissertation for a popular Dutch press. 

Maaike has a background working in the arts, working on events, and talks around the body and the senses, such as smell and taste. 

Popular (non-academic) writing on chronic illness and illness memoirs in Dutch has appeared in De Nederlandse Boekengids, De Groene Amsterdammer and Tirade.