Prof. Dr. Emilie Sitzia holds a Special Chair at the University of Amsterdam (Illustration) and is an Associate Professor Cultural Education at the University of Maastricht. She is a Comenius Leadership Fellow and PI of the research project Senses-based Learning (NRO funded). She was an advisory board member for the Koopman collection (KB) and is an Ambassador for the Illustration Embassy Amsterdam and is a Cambridge Visual Culture Visiting Research Fellow.

She is the former programme director of the Master Arts and Heritage, the former AMC Research Group Director (Arts, Media, Culture Research group), and the former Scientific Director of the programme Arts, Sciences and Society at the Aix-Marseille IAS (IMéRA – Institute for Advanced Study (France)). She is currently the co-director of the Word-Image research group at the University of Amsterdam. She was a research fellow at the Institute for advanced study in Marseille in 2019-20 (Iméra/Mucem Chair). Before coming to Maastricht Emilie was a lecturer at Abo Akademi University (Turku, Finland) (2001-2004) and an assistant professor at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) (2005-1012). She was educated in France, Germany and Finland where she followed a double major in Art history and theory and French Literature. She holds a PhD in French literature and culture (2005).

She specialises in word/image interdisciplinary studies (especially illustration in the 19^th and early 20^thcentury), museum participatory practices, the impact of art on audiences, and digital and sensory education. Emilie’s research spans the fields of history, literary studies, art history, museology, cultural education and sociology. She focuses on issues of storytelling, identity and multimodality in space, in text and in images.

Her special chair at UvA is supported by the Fiep Westendorp Foundation and the Van Gogh Museum.