Conference 2025 Theme
Utrecht University’s Humanities Graduate School Conference 2025:
The Human Body in Culture, History, and Expression
Conference date: 22 May 2025, Academiegebouw
We are thrilled to announce the 2025 Humanities Graduate School Conference, The Human Body in Culture, History, and Expression. After a four-year hiatus, the Graduate School of Humanities is proud to reinstate this vital space for reflection and discussion among graduate students and early-career researchers across diverse humanities disciplines. Under the theme of The Human Body in Culture, History, and Expression, this year’s conference will explore the human body as a dynamic and multifaceted site for examining cultural transformations, expression, resistance, and historical narratives, as well as the role of the human body in shaping our understanding of identity, history, and our interconnected world.
Dr. Willemijn Ruberg will be joining the conference as our keynote speaker, presenting “Historicizing the right to bodily autonomy”.
Dr. Willemijn Ruberg is an Associate Professor in Cultural History at the Research Institute for History and Art History of Utrecht University. She published History of the Body (2020) in the History and Theory series of Palgrave MacMillan/Red Globe Press. Currently she is working on a book discussing the cultural history of the right to bodily integrity in modern Europe. Together with Danielle Kinsey and Sanjam Ahluwalia she is editing the Oxford Handbook of the History of the Modern Body (2027).
The 2025 HGS Conference Program has been published and features over 30 presentations from MA students and PhD candidates from the Graduate School of Humanities covering themes of:
- Disability and sense-making
- Embodied knowledge, affect, and technologies of the body
- The body in media, art and performance
- Multi-modal communication
- Bodily autonomy and the body politic
- Social reproduction, labor, and the body
- The hybrid posthuman body and its relation to non-human bodies
- Colonial and postcolonial bodies
To attend the conference, please register using the following form:
The HGS Conference is organized for Utrecht University’s (R)MA students and PhD candidates by Utrecht University’s (R)MA student and PhD candidates. This conference is organized under the advice of a Steering Committee, consisting of UU Humanities faculty members.