Renée Vulto is Assistant Professor of Intangible Cultural Heritage. She has an educational background in musicology and literary studies and wrote her thesis on eighteenth-century Dutch revolutionary song culture. This research is forthcoming as a monograph titled Politics of Feeling in Songs of the Dutch Revolutionary Period (1780-1815) with Amsterdam University Press. Renée teaches courses on media history, intangible heritage, and (post)colonial cultures in the BA programme History and the MA Cultural History and Heritage, and regularly engages with other student groups, interdisciplinary academic audiences, and a broader public.
In her research Renée is interested in the role of sound (ranging from silence to noise) in the past, especially in situations of conflict and violence. She combines methods and perspectives from the history of emotions, sensory history, sound studies, and digital humanities to aproach a broad range of sources (texts, music, objects, practices). Her current project Sounds of Oppression and Subversion focuses on song, music, and sound as means of both political dominance (silencing unwanted sounds) and subversion (sounding resistance) in Dutch colonial regimes, more specifically the Caribbean.
In 2020, Renée initiated and co-founded the international . The SSN hosts a regular online seminar series and edits a book series with Amsterdam University Press. She is a board member of the ensemble , the ‘musical memory of the Netherlands’. Within the 乐鱼后台, Renée is involved in the UGlobe Decolonisation Group, and works as a steering board member of the Utrecht Centre voor Early Modern Studies.