DrClara Vlessing

Clara Vlessing is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary and cultural analysis. She researches the relationship between memory and social movements with particular attention to the role of gender. Clara is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at UCD. Her project Andrea Dworkin's Afterlives: Woman Hating in Twenty-First Century Feminism looks at the cultural memory of the controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin (1945-2005). 

Clara is an editor-in-chief of Digest - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies. Between 2022 and August 2026, she was co-chair of the Memory Studies Association’s working group on Memory and Activism. She also holds an FWO-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions–Seal of Excellence postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University and has previously held a postdoctoral position within the NWO NWA-ORC project Heritages of Hunger at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Her PhD, completed in 2023, was part of the ERC project Remembering Activism at Utrecht University.

Clara is a co-editor of the volume Remembering Contentious Lives (Palgrave 2025), with Duygu Erbil and Ann Rigney, and a special collection of the journal Memory, Mind & Media titled ‘Comics, Memory, Activism' (CUP 2025), with Vasiliki Belia and Kristina Gedgaudaitė. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles (Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 2021; Social History/Histoire Sociale 2023; Memory Studies 2026 with Charley Boerman) and book chapters (The Visual Memory of Protest, AUP 2023; Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization, de Gruyter 2025 with Duygu Erbil; Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict, Palgrave 2025; Remembering Contentious Lives, Palgrave 2025).

Her monograph Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst was published in De Gruyter’s Media and Cultural Memory Studies series in 2026.