About
My Story
Over the past one and a half years, my adventures in Nature have prompted me to re-assess my values and beliefs. I have come to learn more about what it means to be whole within ourselves, among each other, and with the more-than-human world. And I have become convinced that everything is deeply interconnected. Yet, the way in which societies across the world have been interacting with the more-than-human world is anything but indicative of kinship. We are deeply estranged from the natural world, primarily viewing our earthly home as a place to use, to extract from, and to exploit.
I believe that a paradigm shift is needed, one where we move away from a paradigm of separateness and competitiveness to a paradigm of community and connection. I wish to make a contribution in bringing about this shift and I wish to do so through my poetry and academic work (see under Portfolio), as well as with the cultural practice that I am building in the form of Reverence Walks. Language is a common thread in all of this. I am interested in how language behaves across the emotional, ecological, and sociological landscapes that we inhabit, and how it can invite reflection, reverence, and revolution.
My Lived Experience
I have had the honour to work as a Treaty Lawyer for the Kingdom of the Netherlands for 8 years. Before my job as a Treaty Lawyer, I worked on a PhD thesis in Legal Theory, more specifically, in the field of Language and Law. As such, I had the honour to spend a semester at iCourts, a centre of excellence at the University of Copenhagen.
I hold a BA in English with a minor in Gender and Sexuality in Literary Studies, and an MPhil in Linguistics with a specialisation in Language Variation and Change, both from Leiden University. For my MPhil thesis, I was awarded the Robert Lowth Thesis Award.
In addition, I have a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree (with honours) in Law, both from Erasmus University Rotterdam. For my Master’s, I specialised in Legal Theory.
Next to these degrees, I have earned a certificate in Literary Theory and a certificate in Critical Reading (of modern English literature), both from the University of Oxford.
