Advisor on Interdisciplinary Research and the Piet Zwart Institute Interdepartmental Think Tank

Prof. dr. Frans-Willem Korsten has a long history within the Piet Zwart Institute. From 2003-2008, he worked as a core tutor within the Master of Fine Art programme. As an advisor in the PZI Think Tank, Korsten plays a central role in enhancing interdisciplinary research across the various programmes. Along with the Director, Renée Turner, he is exploring models for artistic and design research that intertwine theory and practice in non-hierarchical and imaginative ways.

Next to his work within the Institute, Korsten holds the chair ‘Literature and Society’ at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and works at LUCAS, the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (department of Film and Literary Studies). His PhD thesis was on different forms of cultural criticism. Since then he published, apart from a wide range of articles and other sorts of texts, a new style introduction Literary Studies, Lessons in Literature (reprinted three times, 2002, 2005, 2009); All inclusive: the poetic in capitalism (2007); Sovereignty as Inviolability (Hilversum: Verloren, 2009); he contributed to, and edited a vast collection of essays on the most important Baroque playwright of the Netherlands, Joost van den Vondel (Brill, 2012). He is lecturing on Literature, art and capitalism; literature, art and law; the Western history of aesthetics and ideas; and the manifold relations between politics and art. Together with Yasco Horsman he started the Leiden Platform for Literature, Rhetoric and Law. He is responsible for an international NWO program – together with Joost de Bloois and Monica Janssen – on precarity and post-autonomia, in cooperation with the universities of Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor and Paris Nanterre. Together they have organised three international conferences on the issue in the period 2011-2013.