Professor emerita Anneke Smelik enjoys having more time for research, writing & lecturing, coaching, chairing, interviews, travels, walks, and going to the movies (well, that is the aim at least!).

A brief professional biography
I was Professor of Visual Culture at RICH, the Radboud Institute for Culture and History at Radboud University of Nijmegen (Netherlands), where I happily worked for 25 years and a bit. Having studied theatre and cinema studies in the 1980s, I started my academic career in gender studies, gay & lesbian studies, and film studies, both at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. I am still keen on watching television series and movies, although actually my big love is modern dance. I enjoy having more time to follow those old passions.

In Nijmegen I continued research and teaching on visual media such as film, television and videoclips, focusing on cyborgs and digital culture. Together with colleagues we worked on issues of ‘Cultural Memory’ for many years, resulting in several conferences and books. I was involved in the BA Arts and Culture Studies for all of those 25 years, and set up an international MA in Creative Industries (since 2013). Gradually, I shifted my focus to fashion studies, seeing huge potential in this field that was not yet studied within an academic setting in the Netherlands. Initiating academic research on fashion around 2007, I became project leader of two large NWO-funded research programmes on fashion; one on Dutch fashion and one on wearable technologies for fashion.

In Spring 2022 I was visiting professor at LUAV in the beautiful city of Venice. In 2018-19  I was a senior Fellow at the NIAS, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam. In 2017  I received the Radboud Science Award for innovative research on fashion, which involved developing lessons on fashion for kids at primary school: cool! (het lespakket is beschikbaar).

What I am doing now
As you can see from my publications on the Fashion page, over the last ten years I have integrated theoretical approaches into fashion studies: new materialism, Deleuzean philosophy, posthumanism. I am now developing the idea of Buddhist mindfulness as a new perspective for fashion studies. I’ve been working on a second edition of the successful co-edited book Thinking through Fashion (OUT NOW!) and on an open access co-edited volume The Four Elements of Fashion. I also co-edited a special issue “Fashion’s Fibres as Planetary Flows” for Fashion Highlight Journal (2024). I was involved in an Erasmus+ programme Sustainability for Fashion & Food (finished in 2024). A lot of my time is dedicated to co-editing the wonderful journal Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (check it out and submit an article!).

In 2025 I chair the national panel for the formal evaluation of Communication and Information Studies and Media Studies, for the NVAO (Accreditation Organization of the Netherlands).

For publications see also my pages on ResearchGate, ORCID, or Academia.edu.

My research focuses on:

• an exploration of mindfulness for fashion studies
• slow fashion and issues of sustainability
• posthuman fashion
• new materialism in fashion studies
• a Deleuzean perspective on fashion