Dr Anique Hommels (A.M.)

Prof.dr. Anique Hommels holds a special chair in Sociohistorical Technology Studies. This chair is supported by the Foundation of the History of Technology (SHT). Her activities focus on management, research and teaching.

She is the Head of Department of Society Studies and the Programme Director of the Research Master Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology (CAST). Between 2015 and 2018 she was the Programme Director of the BA Arts and Culture.

Her research focuses on urban sociotechnical change, obduracy and vulnerability of (critical) infrastructure. She studies urban resilience and vulnerability, and how cities try to innovate themselves in pre- and post-disaster situations. In her research, she brings together insights from Science and Technology studies (history and sociology of technology) and urban studies.

Hommels teaches in the BA Arts & Culture, BA European Studies, MA ESST, and the research Master CAST.

Anique Hommels was trained in the interdisciplinary Arts and Science programme of Maastricht University (1991-1995). In her PhD thesis, she concentrated on the resistance to change (‘obduracy') in urban sociotechnical transformation processes. A book (Unbuilding Cities - Obduracy in Urban Sociotechnical Change (2005). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), based on her thesis, was published by MIT Press in 2005 (paperback edition Fall 2008).

After her PhD, she worked as a researcher at MERIT/Infonomics (Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology) (2001-2004). At MERIT/Infonomics, her empirical focus shifted to the network society and the vulnerability of sociotechnical systems.

In 2003, she was awarded the Brooke Hindle Fellowship from the American Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).

Together with Dr. T.M. Egyedi and Prof.dr.ir W.E. Bijker she received an NWO-grant for the project "Complex interactions between international standardization and national innovation projects" (2007-2010). Hommels was also one of the principle investigators in the ESF/Eurocores project "Europe goes Critical: The emergence and governance of critical transnational European infrastructures" (2007-2009). An edited book, based on this project was published in 2014 by Palgrave MacMillan.

Her research focuses on urban resilience after a disaster and the question how cities can be made more sustainable, given the perpetual obduracy and fluidity of urban infrastructure. This is also the focus of her special chair (supported by SHT).

Hommels currently works on the Embedterlabs project (funded by NWO) in collaboration with Dr. M. Dijk and Dr. D. Nixon of the Maastricht Sustainability Institute. Embedterlabs investigates how small-scale urban experiments can be better embedded in urban policy mixes.