Thony Visser (LUCAS) leaves Leiden
As of November 1st 2019, Professor Anthonya (Thony) Visser will become Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen and will leave LUCAS.
Visser, Professor of Modern European Literature and Culture, in particular German, has been with our faculty since 1999 and has been the Academic Director of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) since 2014.
Thony Visser has held many managerial positions both within and outside the university, such as Chairman of the German Language and Culture programme and Literary Studies MA programme. She was a member of the Humanities Division of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), a board member of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) and a member of the Supervisory Board of the Fryske Akademy. She has also held several international positions, including senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and visiting Professor at Emory University in Atlanta. She was also a member of committees that evaluated humanities research in the United Kingdom and Norway. In recent years she has been working at LUCAS, focussing on financial stability, making work processes more transparent and making the institute's organisation more efficient.
Logical next step
Visser: ‘It’s an honour to be appointed Dean of the wonderful Faculty of Arts in Groningen. It is a logical next step in my career and at the same time the perfect challenge. I am pleased that I will be able to use the experience that I have gained in Leiden, the Netherlands and abroad, concerning the Humanities, in Groningen.
As a Professor and Board member, I look back on an exciting and instructive time at the Humanities faculty. I have met inspiring people here (colleagues and students), have had valuable conversations about our disciplines and our ways of working and I have enjoyed working with my many colleagues from both inside and outside the faculty. I would like to thank everyone, in particular the Faculty Board and my colleagues at LUCAS, for our cooperation. The world is small, we will probably meet again and I will continue to follow the Humanities faculty in Leiden with great interest.’
Cooperation
Dean Mark Rutgers: 'I want to congratulate Thony on this wonderful next step. She has meant a lot to our faculty and she will be missed. Her dedication and commitment have always been very strong and I am grateful for the pleasant and constructive cooperation. On behalf of the entire Faculty Board, I wish her good luck with this new challenge. Undoubtedly we will meet each other regularly during the national Humanities Dean meetings, so this is not really a goodbye.’
Who will succeed Thony Visser as Academic Director of LUCAS is not known yet.
More information: Read University of Groningen's news article.