Department of Literature & Art

We deliver teaching capacity to the educational programmes at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS), most notably the BA and MA in Arts and Culture, the BA in Digital Society, the MA in Media Studies: Digital Cultures, and the Research Masters CAST. We also coordinate a wide range of courses in the liberal arts programme at University College Maastricht. Additionally, we contribute to the operation of The Plant, the FASoS digital laboratory that offers resources, expertise, and workshops to all BA and MA programmes. 

Our teaching emphasises various methods of analysis, such as narrative, discourse, and visual analysis, (digital) ethnography, and design thinking, and we are committed to the development of open educational resources and educational research, including on the role of GenAI in different aspects of the teaching and learning process. We also serve on quality assurance Bodies, including Educational Programme Committees, Curriculum Teams, and the Assessment Support Team. 

We have research expertise across a wide range of disciplines, including art and literary studies, media and cultural studies, performance studies, digital humanities, heritage and museum studies, cultural industries and policy, gender and diversity studies, and sociolinguistics. What connects this range is a shared conviction that cultural forms: a poem, a film, an installation, a dialect, a 3D model, or a museum collection,  are never simply objects of analysis, but sites where questions of power, memory, care, and belonging are worked out. 

We have received funding from Dutch and international institutions for research related to conserving installation and performance art; tracing the histories of LGBTQ+ archives; rethinking heritage practice for a more inclusive sector; poetry and storytelling in dementia care; care aesthetics in disability performance; dialect and belonging in Limburg; regenerative building practices; walking as a method for confronting colonial and ecological legacies in landscape; minimalism and postgrowth culture; hacker and maker communities; feminist technology activism; game and platform cultures; the sounds of empire in colonial literature and radio; and 3D scholarship.

Most of us are affiliated with the research programme Arts, Media, and Culture (AMC), and many contribute to the Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage (MACCH) and the Centre for Gender and Diversity (CGD). We are also strongly represented in national research schools, including the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) and the Netherlands Research School for Media Studies (RMeS).

We work closely with a wide range of societal partners, including museums, archives, care facilities, and hacker spaces, across the Maas–Rhine Euroregion, the Netherlands, and beyond. In these collaborations we use formats such as field labs, co-creation, citizen science, open publication, advisory work, workshops, and public seminars. This reflects the faculty’s broader emphasis on innovative forms of exchange with citizens, residents, visitors of heritage organisations, amateur historians, artists, curators, and policymakers regionally, nationally, and internationally, and on outputs that reach beyond academia.