Susanne C. Knittel is associate professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She is the coordinator of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the co-director of the Network for Environmental Humanities. Her research revolves around the figure of the perpetrator in cultural memory and memory politics, and the cultural representation of the genocide-ecocide nexus.

Susanne is the principal investigator of the EcoViolence project. Her research within the project revolves around the representation of ecologies of violence in theater and in prose fiction. In particular, she explores how realist genres such as documentary theater, autobiography, or the historical novel are reimagined to represent the multidirectional links between eco-violence, genocide, and colonialism and map different forms of involvement and implication in these histories. For example, in her sub-project on contemporary eco-dramaturgy, she examines the recent resurgence of tribunal theater in the context of the ecocide discussion and how theater makers blur the boundaries between the courtroom and the theatre to create a space where alternative forms of justice and testimony can be played out.

Ifor Duncan is Postdoctoral Researcher on the EcoViolence project at Utrecht University. His inter-disciplinary research and art-practice focuses on political violence in the contexts of devastated river systems and dispossessed communities. These include the weaponisation of rivers as borders (Evros/Meriç/Maritsa, Greece and Turkey), mega-dam projects (Hidroituango on the Cauca, Colombia) and rivers as mediums and dynamic archives of genocide (Wisła, Poland). He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, fieldwork and an artist audio-visual practice that involves submerged methods. 

My subproject ‘Conflict Rivers’ focuses on creative, investigative, spatial and memory practices that engage with violence against the socio-ecologies of river systems and water more generally. With the emergence of rights of nature, ecocide and environments being declared victims, this project considers these discourses and their implciations for cultural memory with specific consideration for the role ecoaesthetics—from documentary practice to installation—plays in extrapolating the entangled and unevenly distrubuted violence against human and multi-species communities. In parallel, Ifor also curates the River Cinema series which explores the role of artist moving-image in contemporary river activism, starting from the question: what happens when we take seriously the idea of a river as moving image?

Sofia Lovegrove is a PhD candidate in the EcoViolence project. Her research and work lie at the intersection of cultural memory, museums and critical heritage studies and decolonial critique and practices. Within this project, Sofia focusses on how museums frame and remember environmental degradation as violence.

Sofia’s subproject focusses on how museums and heritage institutions are implicated in and represent environmental degradation as violence, and how they articulate questions of guilt, implication and responsibility. She explores how these narrative and epistemic spaces are engaging with the multidirectional links between ecological violence, colonial histories and their afterlives in the present, particularly in relation to the Portuguese and Dutch cases. Furthermore, Sofia is interested in how narratives and practices of “repair” are articulated and enacted through museological practices.

For the past six years, her work as a cultural heritage practitioner has focused on (representations of) the colonial past and issues of identity, belonging, equity, inclusion and international cooperation, and on strategies for addressing the continuities of colonialism in the present through memory and heritage practices. An important topic for Sofia is the international debate and processes of restitution (of knowledge, memories and historical objects). She is one of the founding members of the collective Disrupting and Reorienting Restitution and an active member of TheMuseumsLab alumni network.

Tom van Bunnik is a PhD candidate in the EcoViolence project. His work is situated within the fields of ecopoetics, ecocriticism, and cultural memory studies. Tom’s research focuses on how contemporary eco-poetry frames and remembers environmental degradation as violence.

My project The Poetics of Eco-Violence explores how contemporary eco-poetry represents environmental degradation as entangled with other histories, forms, and memories of violence. In particular, my project examines how eco-poetry mobilizes and reinvents poetic conventions to make visible these multidirectional links of eco-violence. Through a comparative, transcultural, and translinguistic analysis, my research engages critically with Anglophone, German, and Dutch poetry, both from the Global North and Global South, representing the entanglement of environmental degradation with other histories of violence – e.g. colonialism and genocide – to explore how these poets reflect on questions of implication and responsibility in ecologies of violence. In doing so, this project contributes to the EcoViolence project by showing how a poetics of implication and responsibility informs the cultural imagination of eco-violence.

Bianca Visser I supports the ERC research project Ecologies of Violence as project coordinator. As such, I am responsible for the day-to-day management, carry out administrative tasks, coordinate conferences and ensure that the website is up-to-date. I also contribute to the EU reports that have to be delivered every so often to our benefactor. Don’t hesitate to reach out should you have a question about the project or our activities. I’ll be happy to help.