Project Leader
Glyn Davis (he/him) is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is a historian and theorist of queer visual culture, with a specialist interest in experimental and avant-garde cinema. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of a number of books. Recent publications include The Richard Dyer Reader (BFI/Bloomsbury, 2023 co-edited with Jaap Kooijman) and Pop Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2024, co-edited with Tom Day). He is currently writing a BFI Classic on Rebel Without a Cause.
From 2016 to 2019, Glyn was Project Leader of Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, a pan-European queer history project funded by HERA and the European Commission. The project involved 28 researchers based in Germany, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. In addition to a series of major international conferences, the project generated an array of publications, including Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now, a special issue of Third Text that Glyn co-edited with Fiona Anderson and Nat Raha.
Glyn’s writing has appeared in journals including Aniki, GLQ, JCMS, MIRAJ, and Screen. He is a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College, and sits on the board of Third Text.
Principal Investigator
Eliza Steinbock (they/them) is Full Professor and Chair in Transgender Studies, Art and Cultural Activism and director of the research platform Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. As chairholder, Eliza investigates inclusion and exclusion mechanisms operative in the art, culture, media, and heritage sectors and studies a range of practices that are aimed at changing inequalities. Current projects include “The Critical Visitor” (NWO 2020-2025) as project leader and “Perverse Collections” (JPI – Cultural Heritage 2023-2025) as PI of the Dutch team. They published the monograph Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019) and is co-editor of the book series ASTERISK: Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After. Their most recent edited volume is in Dutch and English, The Critical Visitor: Changing Heritage Practices || De kritische bezoeker: erfgoedpraktijken in verandering (2023) (download it here).
Principal Investigator
Professor Juan Antonio Suárez (he/him) teaches American Studies at the University of Murcia, Spain. His main academic interests are modernist literature, independent and experimental cinema, contemporary art, and sound studies.
He is the author of books including Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press, 1996), Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (University of Illinois Press, 2007), and Experimental Film and Queer Materiality (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is also an associate editor of the “Cinema and Modernism” section of Routledge’s on-line Encyclopedia of Modernism and the co-editor, with David Walton, of the volumes Culture, Space, Politics: Blurred Lines (Lexington / Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) and Borders, Networks, Escape Lines: The Spatial Politics of Contemporary Fiction (Peter Lang, 2016). He has published numerous essays on modernist literature and experimental film in Spanish and English. Recent work in English has appeared in journals such as Grey Room, ExitBook, Criticism, and Screen, and in the edited collections Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa Uhlirova (Walther Koenig, 2014), and The Modernist World, eds. Lindgren and Ross (Routledge, 2015), among others.
He has curated film programs for Xcéntric/Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Tate Modern-London, Museum Reina Sofía (Madrid), and MOCA-LA-Pacific Film Archive. He was one of the Principal Invetsigators of the trans-European collaborative research project “Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures,” which involved the University of Edinburgh, Humboldt University, University of Warsaw, and University of Murcia, and was funded by HERA and the European Commission.
Postdoctoral student
Alberto Berzosa (he/him) holds a PhD in Art History and Theory. He works in the space where contemporary art, film studies, political archives and curatorship intersect. He has published books including Materiales para una utopía ecologista (2024) and Homoherejías fílmicas (2014), and has curated exhibitions at the Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Institut Valenciá d’Art Modern and La Casa Encendida. He has also coordinated film programmes. A recent programme screened at the Filmoteca Española, entitled “A la contra y desde abajo: disidencias sexuales y de género en torno al cine español (1969-1983)”, showed an extended genealogy of perverse imaginaries in contemporary Spain. He currently works as Associate Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is not only a member of the Perverse Collections team, but also a member of the management committee of the Cost Action “Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice” (TRACTS) project.
Postdoctoral student
Sandro Weilenmann (he/him) is a postdoctoral atudent at the University of Maastricht. He is an art historian currently working on artistic participation in queer and trans archives. His fields of research are Western performance art and acoustic artistic practices after 1960. His publication The Present Voice: Vocal experiments in the works of Adrian Piper, VALIE EXPORT, and Yvonne Rainer will appear in winter 2024.
Research Assistant
Layan Nijem (they/them) is a research assistant for PERCOL’s Dutch team at Maastricht University.
Layan holds an MA degree in Arts and Culture: Music Studies with a specialization in sound archives. By engaging with sound recordings, Layan’s research investigates the dynamics of cultural memory and the politics of narrative in relation to identity formation, sovereignty, and cultural agencies.
Besides working with PERCOL, Layan is the Project Coordinator of the transnational research project “Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives” (DeCoSEAS, JPI – Cultural Heritage 2021-2024). They also currently serve as the interim co-curator of the Jaap Kunst Sound Collection at the University of Amsterdam.
Layan also holds a Bachelor of Music in classical Viola performance.
Project administrator
Sarah Frankowski (she/her) is a Senior Research Administrator for the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Film in the University of St Andrews.
After 12 years working in finance and accounts, Sarah brings an analytical approach to the project and enjoys the large volumes of data and the finances that come with research projects.
As well as looking after the administration for ‘Perverse Collections’, Sarah is also involved in the Wellcome-funded project “The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis”, and she is a COST EU Grant Manager for “Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice” (TRACTS).
The Perverse Collections team are supported and guided by an amazing advisory board: Professor Susan Stryker, Ajamu X, and Professor Elahe Haschemi Yekani. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, and is founding executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, and co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. Ajamu X is a British artist, activist, curator and archivist. He was the co-founder of the rukus! Black LGBT cultural archive, a major collection of materials related to Black queer and trans lives, now housed at the London Metropolitan Archives. Haschemi Yekani is Professor of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. Currently, she is project leader of ‘Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary: Aesthetics, Affects, Archives’, which is supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant.