Janna Houwen is assistant professor at the Film and Literary Studies Department of Leiden University. She received her Ph.D. with honors from Leiden University (Mapping Moving Media, 2014) and holds degrees in Literary Studies (MA, Leiden University, cum laude), Comparative Literature (BA, Leiden University, cum laude), and in Visual Art (BA, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague).
Since September 2014, Janna has been working as an assistant professor (UD) at the Film and Literary Studies Department at Leiden University (LUCAS, Leiden Centre for the Arts in Society).
Janna’s main fields of expertise are (new) media theory, film and video, cultural theory and comparative literature. She has published on several topics, including intermediality and mediumspecificity, intercultural video art, cinema and the refugee crisis, surveillance, and the machinic. She is the author of Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (Bloomsbury 2017), and has co-edited Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (Brill 2018) and Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique (Palgrave Macmillan 2020).