Tjalling Valdés Olmos is Assistant Professor of Global Media Histories in the Department of Media Studies and the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies.  Tjalling's work analyzes the globalization of settler colonial imaginations by asking how genre - affectively, aesthetically, and historically - mediates the function of and resistance to settler colonialism. His research and teaching are anchored in decolonial and queer methodologies, and broadly asks how media shapes the tricky ways in which people collectively, intimately, and differentially navigate and inherit historically interlocking forms of power/oppression. Other areas of interest include speculative history; cultural critique and analysis; ambivalence; pop cultural mediations of friendship, conflict, normativity, and difference; indigenous studies; black feminist theory; queer of color studies; multilingual and transnational media; haunting; cultural geography and rural studies. 

Tjalling obtained his PhD - a study which, through the work of Sylvia Wynter, Raymond Williams, and Laurent Berlant, investigates genres of spatialization and their affective and political function in popular cultural imaginations of North American rural geographies – at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World’. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Leiden University, an MSc in History of International Relations from the London School of Economics, and an rMA in Gender & Ethnicity Studies from Utrecht University.

His writing appears in PhiloSOPHIA, Collateral Journal for Cross-Cultural Close Reading, Junctions, Armada: Tijdschrift voor Wereldliteratuur. Tjalling's latest publication "Ambivalence and Resistance in Contemporary Imaginations of US Capitalist Hinterlands" (Open Access) appears in the edited volume Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment, and Care (Palgrave 2023). Currently he is co-editing a forthcoming volume with Esther Peeren on cultural imaginations of the rural (Brill 2025), and is working on a monograph titled Affective Inheritances: Rurality, Genre, and Settler Colonial Legacies in Contemporary US Pop Culture. Tjalling is an active member of the Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for Critical Humanities, where you can find some short writings and reflections. 

2024-2025

• Replay and Resist: Settler Colonial His/Stories in Film (MA Film Studies) 
• Genre & Affect: Rural Media and Globalization (MA Television & Cross-Media Culture) 
• Film Analysis (BA Media & Culture) 
• Academic Writing (BA Media & Culture) 
• Friendship & Its Others: Coexistence, Coalitions, Conflict, and Care (MA Arts & Culture) 
• Thesis Supervision (BA Media & Culture; MA Film Studies)

2023-2024

• Twentieth-Century Theory and Its Afterlives (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)
• Thesis Workshop Literary and Cultural Analysis (BA)
• Art, Science and Technology (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis) 
• Thesis Supervision (rMA Cultural Analysis; MA Comparative Cultural Analysis; BA Literary & Cultural Analysis) 

2022-2023

• Concepts for Reading Contemporary Culture (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)
• Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)

2021-2022

• Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)

2020-2021

• Sex/Race/Trans: Human Life-Forms (MA Comparative Cultural Analysis)
• Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)

2019-2020

• Sex/Race/Trans: Human Life-Forms (MA Comparative Cultural Analysis)
• Thesis Supervision (BA Literary & Cultural Analysis)