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Environmental and Health Humanities

This research program joins humanities approaches to human-nature relations, health and medicine, and emotions and senses.

We regret to inform you that, due to government budget cuts, CLUE+ will cease to exist. As a result, this website will be taken down as of April 1, 2025. We appreciate your support and thank you for being part of our journey.

Recognizing that history, society, and culture shape all of these domains, the interdisciplinary fields of Environmental Humanities, Medical and Health Humanities, and the History of Emotions and Senses bring new cutting-edge perspectives to urgent issues, from climate change and public health to individual wellbeing, helping to understand the past and the lessons for the future. 

In current research projects, we explore how Dutch culture related to water and coped with drought in the past, and work with museums and cultural institutions to shape new relations between humans and the natural world. In collaboration with heritage institutes, we consider how collecting and interpreting ‘forgotten’ diseases such as AIDS influences the management of emerging disease threats today. With the WHO we analyze how to adapt global policies to local circumstances. Through historical research we can explain how emotions are culturally diverse and analyse ‘new’ trends such as the democratization of society, affective economies, or emotional regimes (emocracies). With computer science, chemistry, heritage science and industry partners we develop cutting edge techniques in smell recognition and olfactory museology.  

Within CLUE+, this program aims to strengthen collaborations across faculty and university boundaries in new interdisciplinary research projects and research labs.

 Affiliated Research Centers:

  • Environmental Humanities Center
  • ACCESS: Amsterdam Centre for Emotions and Sensory Studies
  • PULSE Centre for Medical and Health Humanities

Research Coordinators: Kristine Steenbergh and Erin la Cour

Kristine Steenbergh (Faculty of Humanities) is an Associate Professor of English Literature. Her research focuses on early modern literature and culture, the history of emotions, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. She co-founded the Environmental Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and is one of the directors of the Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotions and Sensory Studies.


Erin la Cour (Faculty of Humanities) is an Associate Professor of English literature and visual culture. She won the prestigious ECR Consolidator Grant of two million euros in 2023. Together with her team, she is exploring the power of comics in healthcare. Her research engages with questions of how the (inter)mediality, materiality, and historical development of comics interact with, critique, and help shape social and political discourse in various linguistic and cultural contexts. She co-founder and Co-Director of Amsterdam Comics, Vice Research Coordinator for the Environmental and Health Humanities Program of the CLUE+ Interfaculty Research Institute, Co-Director of the PULSE Network: Medical and Health Humanities, and a board member of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis.

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