Maaike Hommes
University lecturer
- Name
- Dr. M.A. Hommes
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2727
- m.a.hommes@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0009-0002-1097-6771

Maaike Hommes is currently working on her PhD in cultural analysis of unexplained illness at the GCSC in Giessen Germany, under supervision of prof. Greta Olson (JLU, Giessen) and prof. Frans Willem Korsten (Leiden University). She is based in Amsterdam and teaches film and literary studies and gender studies.
More information about Maaike Hommes
Maaike Hommes has a background in history, philosophy, and cultural analysis and currently teaches film and literary studies and gender studies.
Maaike’s main research interests are relationality and critical embodiment. More specifically this translates into a range of interdisciplinary research fields such as film studies and literature, materialist feminist theory, affect theory and queer studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine and psychiatry.
Her dissertation traces different routes along which understanding of unexplained illness travels. This dissertation looks at cultural objects such as film, illness memoir, and illness memes and reads these next to medical texts to focus attention on how unexplained illness has a formative effect on the experience of symptoms in the body. She is currently working on an accessible version that translates the work of her dissertation for a popular Dutch press.
Maaike has a background working in the arts, working on events, and talks around the body and the senses, such as smell and taste.
Popular (non-academic) writing on chronic illness and illness memoirs in Dutch has appeared in De Nederlandse Boekengids, De Groene Amsterdammer and Tirade.
University lecturer
- Faculty of Humanities
- Centre for the Arts in Society
- Literary Studies
- Hommes M.A. (2025), Going with ‘the crowd’: representations of unexplained illness and future diagnostic promises in Netflix’s diagnosis. In: Miller G., McFarlane A. & McCormack D. (Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to science fiction and the medical humanities. Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 213-225.
- Hommes M.A. (2024), Het bibberboekje, Tirade 68(494): 21-27.
- Hommes M.A. (2023), Wanneer we ziek zijn, De Groene Amsterdammer (19): .
- Hommes M.A. (2023) Een manifest voor de zieke vrouw. Review of: Hevda J. & Ostendorf T. (2023), Theorie van de zieke vrouw. De Reactor .
- Hommes M.A., Hiskes A. & Koning P. de 9 September 2023, Maaike Hommes, Pepijn De Koning en Andries Hiskes over lichamelijke diversiteit in de literatuur. Drempelstukken 7. De reactor [podcast].
- Hommes M.A., Kreitler M., Boide S. & Brendel B. (2021), Illness, narrated: editorial, On_Culture (11): .
- Hommes M.A. (2020) Feeling (for) the other? : Fiction, empathy, and the critical medical humanities. Review of: Whitehead A. (2017), Medicine and empathy in contemporary British fiction: an intervention in the medical humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (62).
- Hommes M.A. (2020), To love and not to smother: aliens, love and reproduction in Denis Villeneuve’s arrival (2016) and Christopher Nolan’s interstellar (2014), Diffractions 2: 24-46.