About

I am Senior Lecturer of European Studies with a focus on 'Europe in the World' at the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. I worked as a lecturer at the Department of European Studies, UvA (2018-2020), as a lecturer at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at VU Amsterdam (2017-2018) as well as a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS Europe) (2016-2017). I was a PhD researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen where I defended my PhD in 2015.

My research is interested in security, militarism, civil society activism and funding in Europe and the European Union, engaging with feminist, queer, postcolonial and Foucauldian perspectives. In this context I am also working on the United Nations' Women Peace and Security Agenda and Feminist Foreign Policies, such as in the EU, the Netherlands and Germany. 

Between July 2022 and July 2024, I was elected co-chair of the Council of European Studies Gender and Sexuality Research Network. I have been a member of its executive committee since 2019. Currently, I am a diversity advocate at the Capacity Group of 'European Studies' at the UvA.

Amongst many other publications, I co-edited a special issue on ‘Gender, race and coloniality in European security policies’ for European Security. My book “EU Democracy Promotion and Governmentality: Turkey and Beyond” was published by Routledge in March 2019 (Interventions series). It shows how the neoliberal rationalities of EU funding (de)politicised human rights organisations in Turkey. It specifically focuses on the agency of Turkish women's, LGBTQ and human rights organisations working with EU grants; zooming in on e.g. their resistance or co-optation.

In May 2026, I was awarded the NWO Open Competition XS grant for my research project 'Armed Caring' (fall 2026 to fall 2027). ‘Armed Caring’ is an innovative study of the role of the civilian healthcare professional as a reserve soldier against the background of European militaries mobilizing their societies for defence. The project conducts in-depth interviews with medical reservists who have recently joined the Dutch military to understand how medical care-workers embody their new role as soldiers and how they bring back this experience to their civilian medical contexts. The study contributes to a new line of timely research on care and the military and the civilian embodiment of the soldier and its broader societal implications.