Anja Novak of the University of Amsterdam is one of the speakers at the Land Art Lives conference on Oct. 3, 2024.

Anja Novak is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture. Her research focuses on art that operates at the intersection of various disciplines, such as the visual arts, performance, architecture, landscape design, and heritage. As an expert on land art in the Netherlands, she is interested in the geographical situatedness of art, in the changing connections between artworks and sites, and in how site-specific art contributes to identity formation. Another area of research is how works of art can trigger affective responses, and in particular how art can enable engagement with traumatic histories. Her research is connected to affect theory, to the environmental humanities, and to ecological-enactive cognitive science. Recent publications include Precarious ground. An experiential approach to Land art in Flevoland (pdf), published in the Netherlands yearbook for history of art, 2023, Engaging with art skillfully. First steps towards an ecological-enactive account of the experience of art (pdf), co-authored with Geerteke van Lierop and Erik Rietveld, and published in Adaptive Behavior, 2022, and Broken Circle and Spiral Hill. Having entropy the Dutch way(Holt Smithson Foundation, July 2020).