Ernst van Alphen

Leiden University

September–December 2016

Ernst van Alphen is Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Although trained as a literary scholar, a lot of his work is about modern and contemporary art. He published on Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, Christian Boltanski, Charlotte Salomon, Peter Forgacs and many other visual artists. For a long time he worked on Holocaust representation in art, literature, and theory. In 2006-7 he was Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Center for the Humanities and the Social Sciences at Williams College. As Clark fellow he will work on staged photography and the ‘pose’.