Emilie Sitzia (E.L.)

Prof. Dr. Emilie Sitzia holds a Special Chair at the University of Amsterdam (Word and Image) and is an Associate Professor Cultural Education at the University of Maastricht. She is a Comenius Leadership Fellow and PI of the research project Senses-based Learning (NRO funded). She is an advisory board member for the Koopman collection (KB) and an Ambassador for the Illustration Embassy Amsterdam. 

She is the former programme director of the Master Arts and Heritage, the former AMC Research Group Director (Arts, Media, Culture Research group), and the former Scientific Director of the programme Arts, Sciences and Society at the Aix-Marseille IAS (IMéRA - Institute for Advanced Study (France)). She is currently the co-director of the Word-Image research group at the University of Amsterdam. She was a research fellow at the Institute for advanced study in Marseille in 2020 (Iméra/Mucem Chair). Before coming to Maastricht Emilie was a lecturer at Abo Akademi University (Turku, Finland) (2001-2004) and an assistant professor at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) (2005-1012). She was educated in France, Germany and Finland where she followed a double major in Art history and theory and French Literature. She holds a PhD in French literature and culture (2005).

She specialises in museum participatory practices, the impact of art on audiences, word/image interdisciplinary studies (especially French 19th and early 20th century), and digital and sensory education. Emilie’s research spans the fields of history, literary studies, art history, museology, cultural education and sociology. She focuses on issues of storytelling, identity and multimodality in space, in text and in images. 

In 2022 she co-edited the volume Participatory Practices in Art and Cultural Heritage: Learning Through and from Collaboration. In 2019 she was a co-editor for the Stedelijk Studies issue Towards a Museum of Mutuality. She regularly co-curates exhibitions. In 2022 she co-curated the exhibition ‘Once upon a law: the Grimm brothers, stories, language and legal culture’.

Recent relevant publications include in the domain of museology include: ‘The Many Faces of Knowledge production in art museums’ in Muséologies (2018); ‘The ignorant art museum: beyond meaning-making’ in International Journal of Lifelong Education (2017); and the co-authored article with Julia Ferloni “when the society museum gives power: challenges of participatory exhibition co-creation at the Mucem” in Culture & Musées 39 (2022). In the domain of word-image recent publication include: “Picasso’s Poems: Cubist Word Experiments” in Image and Narrative (2021) and “Picture Book Illustrations and Children’s Identity Formation: The Case of Fiep Westendorp’s Jip and Janneke”. in S. Aymes, N. Collé, B. Friant-Kesseler, and M. Leroy (eds.), Book Practices & Textual Itineraries: Illustrating Identity/ies (2020).​