dr. K. (Konstantin) Mierau

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Dr. Konstantin Mierau is Associate Professor for European Culture and Literature (Spanish) at the department of European Languages and Cultures of the University of Groningen. In addition, Mierau is the programme director of the Graduate School for the Humanities , academic director of PhD/i - the learning community for interdisciplinary and interfaculty PhD projects at the UG, and University of Groningen Academic Ambassador for Oceania.

His academic research focuses on the cultural representation of marginality using an interdisciplinary approach. His publications cover Early Modern Spain (a.o. the monograph Capturing the Picaro in Words. Institutional and Literary Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid (Routledge, 2019) as well contemporary Latin America (a.o. the co-edited volume Horizontes Convergentes I & II: Aportes transdisciplinarios al estudio del ecosistema de la marginación cultural. Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2021/2022). He is a key author and contributor of the ANID-funded project Converging Horizons. His current field research focuses on the impact of fiction on the experiences of incarcerated readers, a project for which he is consulted by various government institutions. In addition to research, Mierau is actively involved in outreach, particularly aimed at first-in-family (graduate) students. 

Konstantin Mierau (1981) obtained a Ba in Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen in 2007. In 2009, he was awarded an MA (cum laude) in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a selective two-year research masters programme. In 2009 Mierau obtained a four-year all-expenses-covered Ubbo Emmius PhD-scholarship in order to conduct an independently designed PhD research project. In 2013 this project was finalised with a thesis on the literary representation of transient marginals in early-modern Madrid. For this thesis, Mierau combined extensive archival study in Spain with the analysis of literary representations. From 2010 to 2012 Mierau also held a position as lecturer at the department of Spanish Languages and Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. From 2013 to 2015, Mierau held a position as (Junior) Assistant Professor at the University of Utrecht, where he developed several new courses and taught at the section of Spanish Language and Culture and in the MA-programme Intercultural Communication.