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Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis ASCA

Dr T.R. (Tjalling) Valdés Olmos

Lecturer
Faculty of Humanities
Departement Mediastudies
Visiting address
  • Spuistraat 134
  • Room number: 7.16
Postal address
  • Postbus 1642
    1000 BP Amsterdam
Contact details
  • Research Profile

    Tjalling Valdés Olmos is Assistant Professor of Global and Colonial Media Histories in the Department of Media Studies and the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies.  Tjalling's work analyzes the globalization of settler colonial imaginations by asking how genre - affectively, aesthetically, and historically - mediates the function of and resistance to settler colonialism. His research and teaching are anchored in decolonial and queer methodologies, and broadly asks how 1) genre travels and translates transnationally; and 2) how genre shapes the tricky ways in which people collectively, intimately, and differentially navigate and inherit historically interlocking forms of power/oppression. Other areas of interest include speculative history; cultural critique and analysis; ambivalence; pop cultural mediations of friendship, conflict, normativity, and difference; indigenous studies; black feminist theory; queer of color studies; multilingual and transnational media; haunting; cultural geography and rural studies. Together with Divya Nadkarni he has won the 2025 UvA Humanities Education Jury Award for the MA-course "Friendship & Its Others: Coalition, Coexistence, Conflict, and Care". 

    Tjalling obtained his PhD - a study which, through the work of Sylvia Wynter, Raymond Williams, and Laurent Berlant, investigates genres of spatialization and their affective and political function in popular cultural imaginations of North American rural geographies – at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World’. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Leiden University, an MSc in History of International Relations from the London School of Economics, and an rMA in Gender & Ethnicity Studies from Utrecht University.

    Tjalling's has recenlty co-edited the Open Access volume Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (Brill 2025). You can find some of his writing (Open Access) here: "Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-anxiety as Settler Anxiety" (2025); "Ambivalence and Resistance in Contemporary Imaginations of US Capitalist Hinterlands" (2023). His writing appears in PhiloSOPHIA, Collateral Journal for Cross-Cultural Close Reading, Junctions, Armada: Tijdschrift voor Wereldliteratuur. Currently he is working on a monograph titled Affective Inheritances: Rurality, Genre, and Settler Colonial Legacies in Contemporary US Pop Culture. Tjalling is an active member of the Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for Critical Humanities, where you can find some short writings and reflections. 

  • Teaching

    2025-2026

    • Replay and Resist: Settler Colonial His/Stories in Film (MA Film Studies) 
    • Genre & Affect: Rural Media and Globalization (MA Television & Cross-Media Culture) 
    • Research Project (MA Film Studies)
    • Film Analysis (BA Media & Culture) 
    • Media Research (BA Media & Culture)
    • Academic Writing (BA Media & Culture) 
    • Thesis Supervision (BA Media & Culture; r/MA Film Studies)

    2024-2025

    • Replay and Resist: Settler Colonial His/Stories in Film (MA Film Studies) 
    • Genre & Affect: Rural Media and Globalization (MA Television & Cross-Media Culture) 
    • Film Analysis (BA Media & Culture) 
    • Media Research (BA Media & Culture)
    • Academic Writing (BA Media & Culture) 
    • Friendship & Its Others: Coexistence, Coalitions, Conflict, and Care (MA Arts & Culture) - Winner of the Humanities Education Award
    • Thesis Supervision (BA Media & Culture; MA Film Studies)

    2023-2024

    • Twentieth-Century Theory and Its Afterlives (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)
    • Thesis Workshop Literary and Cultural Analysis (BA)
    • Art, Science and Technology (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis) 
    • Thesis Supervision (rMA Cultural Analysis; MA Comparative Cultural Analysis; BA Literary & Cultural Analysis) 

    2022-2023

    • Concepts for Reading Contemporary Culture (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)
    • Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)

    2021-2022

    • Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)

    2020-2021

    • Sex/Race/Trans: Human Life-Forms (MA Comparative Cultural Analysis)
    • Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)

    2019-2020

    • Sex/Race/Trans: Human Life-Forms (MA Comparative Cultural Analysis)
    • Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis) 

     

  • Publications

    2025

    • Peeren, E. (Ed.), & Valdés Olmos, T. (2025). Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World. (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race; Vol. 36). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004731943 [details]
    • Peeren, E., & Valdés Olmos, T. (2025). Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Introduction. In E. Peeren, & T. Valdés-Olmos (Eds.), Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (pp. 1-36). (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race; Vol. 36). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004731943_002 [details]
    • Valdés Olmos, T. (2025). Rural Historicity in Popular Speculative Futurities: Eco-anxiety as Settler Anxiety. In E. Peeren, & T. Valdés-Olmos (Eds.), Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (Vol. 36, pp. 149-167). (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race; Vol. 36). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004731943_009 [details]

    2024

    2022

    • Peeren, E., Bosma, A., Stuit, H. H., & Valdés Olmos, T. R. (2022). Inleiding: Het platteland - De idylle voorbij? . Armada, 21(75), 4-5.
    • Valdés Olmos, T. R. (2022). De desillusie van de frontieridylle. Armada, 21(75), 10-11.

    2020

    2019

    Prize / grant

    • Nadkarni, D. & Valdés Olmos, T. (2025). FGw Education Award for 'Friendship and its Others'.

    Others

    • Valdés Olmos, T. (organiser) & Peeren, E. (organiser) (22-8-2022). Rural Imaginations (organising a conference, workshop, ...).

    2023

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  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities
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