The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) is located at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. This research community is devoted to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of culture, in all its forms and expressions, from a broad humanities perspective. ASCA is home to more than 110 scholars and 120 PhD candidates active in film and media studies, literature, philosophy, visual culture, musicology, religious studies, theatre and performance studies. Specialists in their own respective fields, ASCA members share a commitment to working within an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates. Within ASCA, they collaborate to provide an innovative and stimulating research environment for scholars, professionals, and graduate students from the Netherlands and abroad.

Patricia Pisters (1965, NL) is professor of Media Studies, with a specialization in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of the peer reviewed Open Access Journal NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and co-editor (with Bernd Herzogenrath) of the series ‘Thinking I Media’ at Bloomsbury. She researches the role of film and media in respect to collective consciousness. Currently she is working on a book project about the psychopathologies of contemporary media culture; and on a multi-media project about filmmakers as metallurgist and alchemist of our times.

Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She is vice-director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS). Recent publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and the edited volumes The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013, with María del Pilar Blanco) and Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Space, Mobility, Aesthetics (Brill, 2016, with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg).