Ginette Verstraete is a professor of Comparative Arts and Media at the Vrije Universiteit (VU). Prior to that she held the Simone de Beauvoir Chair in Contemporary Intellectual History at UvA and was Assistant Professor of Literature and Culture at Maastricht University. She holds a BA in English and Dutch from Antwerp University, an MA in Anglo-Irish Studies from UC Dublin, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from SUNY/Buffalo. She was Visiting Prof/Scholar at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, NYU, CEU Budapest, Open University (GB) and was invited as Jean Monnet Scholar at University of Florida. She sits on the Boards of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis and of the Research School for Media Studies.
Her current research explores the significance of participatory urbanism in Western Europe, from 1960s to the current moment and focuses on the role that media, art and design have played in this.