Keynote speakers

Prof. Ineke Sluiter

Professor of Greek at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts and Society

Ineke Sluiter (PhD 1990) is a Distinguished University Professor of ancient Greek at Leiden University and the former president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). She is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the KNAW and the Academia Europaea. In 2010, she received the Spinoza Prize, the highest academic distinction in the Netherlands. In 2017, a consortium of classical scholars, historians and archeologists under her leadership won a so-called Gravitation Grant (18.8 M €), the first time a research grant of this magnitude was awarded to a Humanities consortium. The Anchoring Innovation program has shown how innovation can affect all domains of society and it emphasizes the importance of ‘the human factor’ in innovation.

Sluiter’s research has focused on ancient ideas on language, public debates in Antiquity, the study of ancient values, ancient ideas on innovation, and cognitive approaches to ancient Greek literature. She is the co-editor of the Oxford University Press book series ‘Cognitive Classics’.

Recent book publications include:

–Social Psychology and the Ancient World. Methods and Applications (ed., with Luuk Huitink and Vlad Glaveanu), Leiden 2025, Social Psychology and the Ancient World – Methods and Applications | Brill;

–Minds on Stage. Greek Tragedy and Cognition (ed., with Felix Budelmann), Oxford 2023;

–Agents of Change in the Greco-Roman and Early Modern Periods: Ten Case Studies in Agency in Innovation (ed. with Silvia Castelli), Leiden 2023, Agents of Change in the Greco-Roman and Early Modern Periods – Ten Case Studies in Agency in Innovation | Brill

In 1900, how did people imagine the year 2000? An interesting source for answering this question will help us to highlight the importance of the Humanities and Social Sciences in thinking about innovation. Imagination, creativity, and future thinking are always anchored and situated. As a result, their year 2000 is not our year 2000. Also, the still predominant association between innovation and technological or medical inventions may obscure the importance of innovation as socially embedded action.

I will use ideas from the research program Anchoring Innovation (www.anchoringinnovation.nl) and cognition studies to take us on a tour that will include imaginings of human flight, automatic doors in Homer’s Ilias, a Greek version of a Persian drinking horn, the icons on our smart phones, and the many different human experiences that are hidden behind one gorgeous marble floor in Rome.

Prof. Ana-Cristina Santos

Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra (CES-UC)

Ana-Cristina Santos is a Sociologist and Senior Researcher with Habilitation in Human Rights at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, where she is Co-Director of the Feminist Studies Doctoral Programme and Chair of the Democracy, Justice and Human Rights Research Line. After being awarded 2 grants by the European Research Council (in 2013 and in 2022), she now leads TRACE, centred on LGBTQI+ ageing in Southern Europe, funded by ERC. Cristina is also an elected member in her second mandate of the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association, working in the areas of Communication, International Relations and Postgraduate Studies, and chairing the committee on Public Sociology, Diversity and Sustainability. Her most recent books are: The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities (2020); The Tenacity of the Couple Norm (UCL Press, Open Access, 2020); LGBTQ+ Intimacies in Southern Europe: Citizenship, Care and Choice (Palgrave, Open Access, 2023); and A Research Agenda for Sexuality and Aging (Edward Elgar Publishing, Open Access, forthcoming 2026).

Contacts:

https://www.ces.uc.pt/en/ces/pessoas/investigadoras-es/ana-cristina-santos

BlueSky: @anacristinasantos.bsky.social

Pronouns: she/ her

There is no future without memory. Despite significant advancements regarding gender and sexual diversity across Southern Europe, such change does not embrace the life course, often leaving older generations in a situation of extended and cumulative vulnerability. In addition, the complexity of queer ageing is increasingly enhanced by the current climate of populism and anti-gender backlash.

My keynote address draws on experiences of ageing as LGBTQI+ people with a sense of survival, pride and joy. In recent years, we have gathered over 100 biographic narrative accounts of 60+ people in Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Slovenia. A selection of these conversations constitutes the backbone of the documentary OUTlasting – Living Archives of Older Queers (forthcoming in late 2025), produced by TRACE – Tracing Queer Citizenship Over Time, a 5-year interdisciplinary research project funded by the European Research Council focused on queer ageing and memory.

Learning from the intersections of ageing, gender and sexual diversity is a theoretical and political gesture of the utmost importance. Today, perhaps more than ever, ageing societies require an age-sensitive queer theoretical lens to design and implement adequate policies, encouraging innovative knowledge production and strengthening democracy in turbulent times. In the last part of this plenary session, we will watch the trailer of the documentary OUTlasting, as part of an ongoing conversation that, for reasons that will become evident during the talk, cannot be postponed.