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Monique Roelofs
Monique Roelofs

Roelofs specialises in teaching and research in the fields of aesthetics, art and politics, critical and political theory, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, decolonial thought and contemporary continental philosophy. The interaction between aesthetics and politics – particularly in relation to dimensions of gender, race, class and other intersecting aspects – is at the heart of her research. In particular, she specialises in the complexities of aesthetic experience as it takes form in our daily encounters and is inspired by people, things and places both within and beyond the world of art.

The chair held by Roelofs is affiliated with the UvA's Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and is part of the Critical Cultural Theory capacity group. This group focuses on aesthetics or the philosophy of art as a philosophical discipline, as well as philosophy and cultural theory. In her teaching and research, Roelofs will transcend the borders between the various disciplines.

She will teach students in the Bachelor and Master programs in Philosophy as well as supervise PhD candidates. Teaching areas include aesthetics and race, art and political economy, critical cultural theory, and the politics of aesthetic concepts.

About Monique Roelofs

After graduating from Radboud University Nijmegen, Roelofs moved to the United States where, in 1997, she was awarded a PhD from the University of Maryland for her doctoral thesis on aesthetic experience. She has since worked at various US-universities, including Duquesne University and Brown University. Since 2002, Roelofs has been affiliated with Hampshire College, where she was appointed Professor of Philosophy in 2016. Furthermore, from 2019 to 2020, she was a Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Political Science department of Amherst College.

Roelofs is the author of Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World (Columbia University Press, 2020) and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury, 2014). She recently completed the manuscript for a new book: Aesthetics, Address and the Politics of Culture. Together with Norman S. Holland, she is in the process of writing The Superreader and the Supershopper: Aesthetics, Time, and the Marketplace in Latin(x) America. With Michael Kelly, she is currently working on an anthology on black aesthetics. Roelofs has published articles in such journals as Hypatia; differences, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; M/m-Print-Plus-Platform; and Texte zur Kunst.