Dr. Kris Rutten is an associate professor at the Department of Educational Studies at Ghent University, where he also leads the research group Culture & Education. He studied Art History and Comparative Cultural Studies and obtained a PhD in Educational Sciences with a dissertation on the rhetorical and narrative turn in education. His fields of expertise include the following:          

• The rhetorical curriculum

• The rhetoric of cultural literacy

• The ethnographic turn in the arts

• The pedagogical role of cultural institutions

Dr. Rutten is the lecturer-in-charge for the BA courses Anthropology and Culture & Education, the MA course Cultural Studies, and the academic teacher training course Culture, Media and Education.

He was also the president of the Rhetoric Society of Europe (RSE) between 2017 and 2023, and he is currently the vice president of the Kenneth Burke Society. Moreover, he is a board member of the International Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) and the president of the Flemish Reading Foundation (Iedereen Leest). He also serves as an Associate Editor of the academic journal Critical Arts. 

Dr. Rutten was also a visiting scholar at the universities of Bath (UK), Stirling (UK), British Columbia (Ca), and Luxembourg (Lux). Current research involves setting up a research collaboration with the Global South.