Biography

Clara Vlessing is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary and cultural analysis. She researches the relationship between memory and social movements with particular attention to the role of gender.

From 2025 to 2027, Clara is an FWO Marie Curie Seal of Excellence postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, where her project looks at the remembrance of leading figures associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement – such as Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Germaine Greer (1939-) and Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) – in twenty-first century feminist cultural production.

Clara is co-chair of the Memory Studies Association’s working group on Memory and Activism. She has previously held a postdoctoral position within the NWO NWA-ORC project Heritages of Hunger at Radboud University, Nijmegen and her PhD, completed in 2023, was part of the ERC project Remembering Activism at Utrecht University.

She is a co-editor of the volume Remembering Contentious Lives (Palgrave 2025), with Duygu Erbil and Ann Rigney, and a special collection of the journal Memory, Mind & Media titled ‘Comics, Memory, Activism’ (CUP 2025), with Vasiliki Belia and Kristina Gedgaudaitė. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles (Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 2021; Social History/Histoire Sociale 2023) and book chapters (The Visual Memory of Protest, AUP 2023; Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization, de Gruyter 2025, with Duygu Erbil; Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict, Palgrave 2025; Remembering Contentious Lives, Palgrave 2025).

Her monograph Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst is forthcoming in De Gruyter’s Media and Cultural Memory Studies series.

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