Trauma and Affect

Given the many current wars and conflicts, it is crucial to understand how trauma works, how it is stored in our bodies, and how it manifests itself time and again. In this programme Ernst van Alphen, Ihab Saloul, Eugenie Brinkema, and Ronald Ophuis engage in a dialogue regarding Van Alphen’s latest book, ‘Trauma and Affect’, in which he explores the power of these concepts through art and literature.

Trauma and affect: both concepts have become increasingly important in the critique of art, literature, and culture since the 1990s. The concepts have been used in many different ways and disciplines, including queer studies, feminism, cultural analysis, art criticism, literary studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as sociology and economics. However, with the current tendency to easily use the concepts in relation to everyday events, they have suffered from inflation. This led to widespread confusion: the terms have been overused and exhausted, thereby losing their critical power.

Ernst van Alphen, Ihab Saloul, Eugenie Brinkema, and Ronald Ophuis will engage in a discussion, posing questions such as: what relevance and critical power do the concepts hold today? And how are they intertwined?

The guiding of this program is Van Alphen’s new book titled Trauma and Affect: (Mis)Understanding Pain Through Art and Culture (Valiz, 2026). Through the lens of visual artworks, literature, and cinema, Van Alphen explains how trauma originates in the past and what explains its re-enactment in the present. In addition, he discusses artists who develop strategies that process affect into critical making and thinking.

The work of visual artist Ronald Ophuis demonstrates how the ideas of trauma and affect are made productive, a proposition that will be explored in greater depth during the panel discussion.

Valiz’s founder and director Astrid Vorstermans will open the programme with a short introduction.

Speakers

Ernst van Alphen is professor emeritus of Literary Studies at Leiden University. Before that, he was Queen Beatrix Professor of Dutch Studies at UC Berkeley. His fields of research and expertise are cultural analysis, trauma and affect studies, and gender studies. He is particularly interested in issues that are central in modern and postmodern literature and in the relation between literature and the visual arts. His most recent publications include: Seven Logics of Sculpture (Valiz 2023), Productive Archiving (ed. Valiz 2023), Shame! and Masculinity (ed. Valiz 2021), among others.

Ihab Saloul is Founder and Research Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), and Professor of Memory and Narrative at the at the University of Amsterdam. Saloul is a founding editor of several book series: Global Heritage and Memory Studies in the Present (Amsterdam University Press), Heritage and Memory Studies (Routledge), Palgrave Studies of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan), and the forthcoming book series Palestine: Past, Present and Future Narratives (Central European University Press CEU).

Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, status-only Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated faculty at the University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the relationship between aesthetic form and violence, affect, sexuality, and ethics. She is the author of numerous articles and two books: The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both with Duke University Press.

Ronald Ophuis lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the AKI in Enschede. Ophuis’s practice interrogates the representation of interpersonal trauma and the pervasive inclination to avert one’s gaze. Drawing on sustained research, dialogues with involved subjects, and carefully staged scenes with actors, he constructs paintings that position the viewer as an implicated witness, mobilizing art as a site for affective engagement, critical reflection, and ethical judgment. He is also a member of SAAC (Sexually Abused Artists Collective).

Astrid Vorstermans is the publisher/founder of Valiz, with a background in art history and a long path in publishing. www.valiz.nl