prof. dr. A. (Thony) Visser

Anthonya Visser is currently the dean of the Faculty of Arts of Groningen University.

Anthonya Visser is currently the dean of the Faculty of Arts.

Until October 2019 she was a full professor of Modern European, in particular German, Literature and Culture at Leiden University (the Netherlands). From 2014-2019 she was the academic director of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

Her previous positions included: Assistant Professor at the University of Marburg, Visiting Lecturer at Tonji University in Shanghai, and Visiting Professor at Emory University in Atlanta. She has also been an invited Visiting Professor at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School at the Free University of Berlin (2010) and an invited senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2012).

She is a member of the Dutch Literary Society (Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde); member of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen); member of the Deutscher Germanistenverband-Gesellschaft für Hochschulgermanistik and member of the Netherlands Graduate School for Literary Studies (OSL).

During the past years, Visser’s research focus in literary studies has been on topics of identity and cultural memory, including Körper und Intertextualität. Strategien des kulturellen Gedächtnisses in der Gegenwartsliteratur (Böhlau 2012). Her work has always paid attention to theoretical questions concerning the position of literature in relation to other ways of producing meaning and human understanding.