Dean

Prof. Dr. Martin van Hees is Dean of Amsterdam University College

Prof. Dr. Martin van Hees is Dean of Amsterdam University College and professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of VU Amsterdam. Previously he held chairs at the University of Amsterdam and University of Groningen. Van Hees' research interests concern the foundations of (moral and political) liberalism. He works on theories of freedom, the analysis of moral responsibility, and the ethics of cooperation and his research has a strong interdisciplinary focus. He has held visiting professorships in Germany (Adam-Smith-Professor of Philosophy and Economics, Bayreuth), China and India. He is a member of the board of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and serves as chair of the Academy’s humanities domain.

Director of Education

Director of Education: Dr. Marianne Riphagen

Dr. Marianne Riphagen is AUC's Director of Education. She served as Head of Studies Academic Core from August 2019 through January 2023. Marianne is a cultural anthropologist specialised in Pacific Studies. Since 2004, she has conducted research with indigenous peoples based in Australia’s metropolitan and desert regions. Her research interests include contemporary indigenous art, economic anthropology and visual anthropology. Marianne is the recipient of the 2006 Endeavour Europe Award and the 2009 Radboud University’s Frye Stipend. In 2011, she received her PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen based on her dissertation entitled “Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Up-and-Coming Artists and their Photomedia Works in Australian and International Visual Art Worlds”. Since then, she has worked at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, United States; at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia; and at Radboud University Nijmegen. As a lecturer, Marianne has taught Bachelor' and Master's students about a range of subjects, notably academic writing and research methods within the social sciences. 

Sciences

Head of Studies (Sciences): Dr. Maarten Boerlijst

Dr. Maarten Boerlijst is AUC’s Head of Studies Sciences. He obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Biology from Utrecht University in 1994. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University until 1997, after which he moved back to the Netherlands to become a Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences fellow. Since 2005, he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and since 2009 he has been Programme Director of the Bachelor’s programme in Biology.

His research areas have been broad, including evolution in the primordial soup, the dynamics of infectious diseases, the evolution of cooperative behaviour and the consequences of spatial self-organisation and collective behaviour.

Social Sciences

Head of Studies (Social Sciences): Dr. Daniel Kontowski 

Dr. Kontowski is AUC's Head of Studies Social Sciences at AUC since April 2022. As a researcher, Dr. Kontowski investigates the theories and practices of contemporary European manifestations of liberal arts and sciences education. He obtained his PhD at the University of Winchester, UK for a study of the first leaders of LAS in eight European countries. Dr. Kontowski studied and worked in Warsaw, New York, Boston, Berlin, and Moscow. Previously, he was Associate Director for Education in the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen in Siberia, where he also taught courses in education, social theory and urban studies.

Humanities

Head of Studies (Humanities): Dr. Erinç Salor

Dr. Erinç Salor is AUC's Head of Studies Humanities. He also teaches New Media Analysis, Perspectives on Games, Media Archaeology, Media Lab (with Dr. Alexandra Brown and Huan Hsu), and Theme: Rethinking Play (with Dr. Lara Mazurski). Dr. Salor received his PhD from Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis in 2012, following a research MA from the same department and an MA in European Studies from KU Leuven. He has been a member of the AUC community since 2013 and a core faculty member since 2015. Between 2017 and 2021, he served as the Humanities faculty representative on AUC’s Board of Studies. His current research interests are New Media Studies, Media Archaeology, Cultural Techniques, and Game Studies.

Academic Core

Head of Studies (Academic Core): Dora Achourioti

Dora Achourioti is AUC's Head of Studies for the Academic Core. She is also the leader of the AUC Taskforce on Generative AI in Education. For many years, Dora coordinated and taught the academic core courses 'Logic, Information flow and Argumentation' and 'Advanced Logic' at AUC (including successfully applying for a Comenius fellowship). She studied Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Athens. She continued her studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she obtained an MPhil in Argumentation at the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric, and an MSc in Logic at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation - both cum laude. She has previous teaching experience at the University of Amsterdam (Philosophy Department and Master of Logic), University of Durham (tutorials) and University College Utrecht. Dora is currently completing her dissertation at the University of Amsterdam (Philosophy Department - ILLC). Her research is centred around the notion of truth and situated between philosophy and logic.

Senior Tutor

Senior Tutor: Huan Hsu

Huan Hsu is AUC's Senior Tutor. He also lectures in journalism, creative writing and academic writing at AUC. He is the author of "The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China" (Crown/Random House, 2015). A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he received his MFA in creative writing from George Mason University, where he also taught literature, creative writing and composition. As a staff writer for the Washington City Paper in Washington, DC, and the Seattle Weekly, he won two Society of Professional Journalists awards and received recognition from the Casey Foundation for Meritorious Journalism. His essays and fiction have appeared in Slate, The Guardian, The Literary Review and Lucky Peach. Hsu began as AUC's Senior Tutor in October 2016.