This event celebrates the publication of Monique Roelofs’ Strange Tastes: Aesthetics and the Public in Latin American and Latinx Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2026). Strange Tastes is a philosophical excursion into aesthetic experience and the public through the works of contemporary Latin American and Latinx women writers and artists. Building common ground between Enlightenment notions of sensibility and the creative capabilities of a decolonial aesthetics, Roelofs shows how life lived aesthetically can embrace public space instead of surrendering it to the constrictive forces of gendering and racial capital. Thus she offers a feminist philosophy of aesthetics that takes seriously the role of the public, where strange tastes turn aesthetic imaginaries into powerful possibilities to remake self, city, nation, and world.

We will present the book through two panels of critical responses from qualified readers and a response from Monique, which hopefully generates further conversations. We’ll pause briefly for a lunch and coffee between panels and conclude with a reception.

Registration for the event is required through the secretariat of the Philosophy department: secr.wijs-fgw@uva.nl

Program:

• 10:30-10:45: Welcome and Introduction (Michael Thomas)
• 10:45-12:45: Panel 1 + Discussion
• Sanem Yazıcıoğlu, Istanbul University
• Adriana Clavel-Vázquez, Tilburg University
• Errol Boon, Freie Universität Berlin, Universiteit Leiden
• 12:45-14:00: Lunch and Coffee break
• 14:00-16:00: Panel 2 + Discussion
• Christoph Brunner, Erasmus University Rotterdam
• Sofía Forchieri, Utrecht University
• Sanjukta Sunderason, University of Amsterdam
• 16:00-17:30: Reception

Organized by Michael Thomas, in collaboration with the Critical Cultural Theory Capacity Group, the Department of Philosophy, and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis.

Participant Bios:

Errol Boon is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and Leiden University. He is an associated researcher at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’ and a board member of the Dutch Association for Aesthetics. He previously worked as a tenured lecturer at the University of the Arts Utrecht and has held visiting positions in Oxford, Rome, Athens, Paris, and Florence. His research focuses on ancient Greek and modern German philosophy (critical theory, phenomenology), addressing questions at the intersection of theoretical philosophy and aesthetics. His work has appeared in Philosophies, Parnassos, Technology & Culture, Pharos, among others.

Christoph Brunner is Assistant Professor for Philosophy of Media and Technology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and part of the academic board of the Rotterdam Arts Sciences Lab. His research concerns the relation between affect, media, and social movements with a particular interest in decolonial practices in the Americas. He also conducts research in the domain of artistic research (research-creation) and frequently collaborates with artists and creative communities. His works have appeared in AI & Society, Third Text and the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture amongst others. He is the co-author of Texturing Space: A Transversal Cartography (adocs) and Polyphone Ästhetik (transversal texts) and recently edited the volume Permeationen: Durchdringungen zwischen künstlerischer Forschung und ästhetischer Theorie (Spector Books). 

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Tilburg University. She is a proud Chilanga, born and raised in Mexico City. Her research is located at the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. She is interested in the interaction of aesthetic and ethical values, the role of embodiment in our engagement with art, and the ethics of imagination. Her current work focuses on issues around universalism about aesthetic value  in contexts of oppression and injustice.

Sofía Forchieri is finishing her PhD at Radboud University Nijmegen and is currently employed as a lecturer in Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American women’s writing, memory studies, and decolonial feminisms. Her dissertation, “Discomfort Work: Reframings of Feminicide in Latin American Literature,” explores how recent literary works from Latin America interrogate and expand existing structures of feminicide remembrance. Sofía’s work has appeared in journals like Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Memory Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Journal of Perpetrator Research.

Monique Roelofs is Professor of Philosophy of Art&Culture and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on art and politics, feminist theory, aesthetics and race, and decolonial and Black aesthetics. Roelofs is the author of The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (2014), Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World (Columbia UP, 2020), and Strange Tastes: Aesthetics and the Public in Latin American and Latinx Feminisms (Duke UP, 2026). Her editorial work includes a special volume on aesthetics and race of the journal Contemporary Aesthetics (2009) and the coedited collection Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is currently completing a monograph that looks at the swerves and coilings of address as a source of aesthetic collectivity.

Sanjukta Sunderason works at the interfaces of twentieth-century aesthetics, socialist thought, and histories of Afro-Asian decolonization. She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Lotte Hoek, University of Edinburgh) of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She teaches art history at the University of Amsterdam, and co-coordinates the university’s Research Priority Area, Decolonial Futures.

Michael L. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Critical Cultural Theory capacity group at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches in Media Studies as a part of the Film Team. His current work focuses on the social aesthetics of race, tracing how Black aesthetic processes have informed Black criticism, subject and community formation, and politics. His current book project, Models of Black Thought, develops an aesthetic philosophy of race through the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde. He has published work in the Critical Philosophy of Race, Philosophy and Literature, American Studies, Social Theory, Political Theory, Speculative Philosophy, and most recently Band Research.

Sanem Yazıcıoğlu is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at Istanbul University. Her research focuses on contemporary philosophy, particularly the theoretical background of phenomenology and hermeneutics and their application in aesthetics and political philosophy. She previously worked at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), and served as a visiting professor at Boston College (the USA). She is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Award and conducted her research at the Husserl Archive Freiburg. Yazıcıoğlu is a member of the Philosophy Commission of UNESCO in Turkey. She is the author of Time, Memory, Perception in Husserl’s Phenomenology (2022) and has several edited volumes and articles; some of the edited volumes are Heidegger and Arendt: Metaphysics and Politics (co-editor, 2002), Hannah Arendt on Her Birth Centenary (2009), and Das Zwischen / In-Between (2013), The Future of Phenomenology (co-editor 2025), Social Sciences and Artificial Intelligence (VI Vol. editor in chief, 2026, in print).