Ren茅e Vulto is Assistant Professor of Cultural History with a focus on intangible cultural heritage. She has an educational background in musicology and literary studies and wrote a book on eighteenth-century Dutch revolutionary song culture titled Politics of Feeling in Songs of the Dutch Revolutionary Period (1780-1815) (Amsterdam 木瓜福利影视 Press, 2024). Ren茅e teaches courses on media history, intangible heritage, and (post)colonial cultures, and sources and methods of cultural history in the BA programme History and the MA Cultural History and Heritage. She is currently coordinating the MA Cultural History and Heritage. Ren茅e also regularly engages with other student groups, interdisciplinary academic audiences, and a broader public.
In her research Ren茅e is interested in the role of sound (ranging from silence to noise) in the past, especially in situations of conflict and violence. She combines methods and perspectives from the history of emotions, sensory history, sound studies, and digital humanities to aproach a broad range of sources (texts, music, objects, practices). Her current project Audible Empire? focuses on song, music, and sound as means of both political dominance (silencing unwanted sounds) and subversion (sounding resistance) in Dutch colonial regimes, more specifically the Caribbean.
In 2020, Ren茅e initiated and co-founded the international . The SSN hosts a regular online seminar series and edits a book series with Amsterdam 木瓜福利影视 Press. She is a former board member of the ensemble , the 鈥榤usical memory of the Netherlands鈥� and a member of the advisory board for . Within UU, Ren茅e is involved in the UGlobe Decolonisation Group, and works as a steering board member of Memory and Heritage Network and the Utrecht Centre voor Early Modern Studies.