After the baccalaureate in classical high school in the Netherlands, I studied French language, literature and civilization. Then, during a few years teaching at a secondary teacher training college, I wrote my doctoral thesis on narrative theory, developed with French novels with a focus on analytical concepts. My feminist commitment led me to work on the Hebrew Bible, whose ideological biases I sought to probe and what Western cultures have made of them (often making them worse). My interest in the focus of narrativity led me to visual art, then, after a few monographs on artists and numerous articles, to the study and creation of exhibitions. The contemporary world, and the desire to understand it better, prompted me to start making films.

My published works include forty-five books, in French, English, Spanish and Dutch, and numerous articles. My work has been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Korean, Serbian and many others. I have held permanent positions at the University of Utrecht, the University of Rochester (New York), the University of Amsterdam, and a large number of visiting positions in various countries, including France (Paris III). Doctoral thesis supervision has always been an important part of my work. I wrote a " mode d'emploi " for PhD students, and to date I have supervised eighty-one completed theses in a wide variety of fields.