As part of the creation of the King Willem Alexander Chair for Dutch Studies, the Dutch Embassy in Belgium has committed itself to providing financial support that allows the Dutch Studies section of ULiège to invite, on an annual basis, eminent Dutch academics with a recognized expertise in the fields of history, society, language, culture and literature of the Netherlands, for the period 2017-2026.
These visiting professors will give academic lectures, participate in research seminars, and interact with ULiège's Dutch-speaking staff to explore and develop long-term scientific collaborations. Consequently, their presence in Liège will strengthen the research and teaching links with the wider academic community of Dutch Studies.
The visiting professors will hold guest lectures in the context of two courses:
In addition, each visiting professor will give a lecture open to the entire academic community.
The guest professor for the academic year 2017-2018 was Professor J.T. (Joep) Leerssen, a literary scholar and historian at the University of Amsterdam. Joep Leerssen has personal ties to the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, as he grew up in Maastricht and studied in Aachen. His research on English and comparative literature led him to pursue a doctorate on the development of Irish national literature. Since 1991, he has been professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, an academic discipline he helped to create himself. This field of research focusses on the history of European political ideas, cultural history and literary sources.
Professor Leerssen was one of the fourteen 'Visiting Professors' of the University of Liège appointed on the occasion of the Bicentenary. He delivered his inaugural lecture, entitled "The Nationalization of Language”, on 6 October 2017 as part of the conference " ‘Between Union and Fragmentation’: Language, Culture and Politics in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830)”. See the recording below.
Between 1995 and 2006, he directed the Huizinga Institute for Research in Cultural History. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Cambridge and Göttingen. He is also the director of several collections, including European Studies, Studia Imagologica and Comparative Critical Studies.
In 2008, Prof. Leerssen was awarded the Spinozapremie, the highest distinction for research in the Netherlands, and was appointed member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW).
Prof. Leerssen is the author of numerous publications of international standing focusing on national stereotypes and the links between literature, historical consciousness and nationalism. He has written several books on the relationship between (self-)stereotypes and nationalism, and on the historical development of cultural and romantic nationalism in 19th-century Europe, using literary texts as a basis for writing a history of ideas.
Joseph Theodoor Leerssen était présent le 6 octobre 2017 à l'Université de Liège à l'occasion du colloque « Entre union et morcellement » : Langue, culture et politique au Royaume Uni des Pays-Bas (1815-1830).
The guest professor for the academic year 2018-2019 was René Boomkens professor of cultural history and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam,. His studies in philosophy, theology and sociology led him to pursue a PhD on modern urban culture (1998). He was then successively Professor in Popular Music at the University of Amsterdam (1998-2002), Professor of Social and Cultural Philosophy at the University of Groningen (1999-2013) and, since 2013, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Prof. Boomkens has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Bremen and Antwerp and at the NSOB (School for Public Administration) in The Hague.
He has been a member of the Cultural Council of the Dutch government, is an advisor to the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), head of the research unit 'Arts and Politics' at the University of Amsterdam, and has worked as an editor for both scientific and literary journals and publishers, including the journal Krisis (1980-1993), of which he was the founder.
Prof. Boomkens' research focuses on topics such as modern urban culture, popular everyday culture, popular music, globalization and neoliberalism, art and artists in the public sphere, and the history and current state of cultural philosophy and aesthetics. He has devoted several books to popular music, the relationship between violence and the media, urban modernity, globalization and the crisis of universities. His numerous publications in both specialized and general public journals often place him at the centre of academic and public debates.
The visiting professor for the academic years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 was Gloria Wekker, Professor Emeritus of Gender Studies. She has occupied the chair for Gender and Ethnicity Studies at the University of Utrecht and was the coordinator of the Master's programme "Comparative Women's Studies in Culture and Politics". She was also the director of GEM, the Center for Gender, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism in higher education. In 2017 she was named by ScienceGuide as one of the ten most influential researchers in the Netherlands.
After studying cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, Gloria Wekker obtained a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In her dissertation I Am a Gold Coin: The Construction of Selves, Gender and Sexualities in a Female, Working-Class, Afro-Surinamese Setting (defended in 1992), she examines the sexual subjectivity of Creole working-class women in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. A Dutch edition was published in 1994. In 2006, she published a sequel to this work, this time from a transcontinental perspective: The Politics of Passion; Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). This work was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize of the American Anthropological Association in 2007.
Gloria Wekker has a particular interest in gender studies and sexuality issues in the Caribbean and the Caribbean Diaspora, but her publications cover areas as diverse as knowledge systems in the academic world and in the Dutch multicultural society, diversity in university curricula, and the history of movements of persons of colour, women, migrants, and refugees in the Netherlands. In addition, she also writes short stories and poetry.
The visiting professor for the academic year 2021-2022 was Nicoline van der Sijs, senior researcher at the Institute of the Dutch Language in Leiden and professor emeritus of Dutch historical linguistics in the digital world at the Radboud University Nijmegen.
Nicoline van der Sijs studied Slavonic Languages and Literatures and Indo-European Comparative Linguistics in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She worked as a researcher at Utrecht University from 1975 to 1989, and at the University of Amsterdam in 1990. From 1990 to 2010 she was a freelance researcher and writer, specializing in historical linguistics and etymology. In 2001 she completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled Chronologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands.
From 2010 to 2020 she was employed as a senior researcher at the Meertens Institute, amongst others as a principal investigator of Nederlab – Laboratory for research on the patterns of change in the Dutch language and culture. In 2013 she was appointed as a part-time professor of Dutch historical linguistics in the digital world at the Radboud University Nijmegen, a position she held until her retirement in August 2021. She is currently working as a senior researcher at the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal in Leiden.
Nicoline van der Sijs has ample experience with crowdsourcing and (historical) corpus linguistics, and has set up a number of large databases in open access, such as etymologiebank.nl, elektronische Woordenbank van de Nederlandse Dialecten and Uitleenwoordenbank.
She is an editor of the journals Trefwoord, Internationale Neerlandistiek and Neerlandistiek, and a regular contributor to the journal Onze Taal. In 2001, Van der Sijs obtained the ANV-Visser-Neerlandiaprijs and was awarded the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prijs voor de Geesteswetenschappen in 2006. In 2020 her monograph 15 eeuwen Nederlandse taal won her the Onze Taal/ANV-taalboekenprijs.
Nicoline van der Sijs has a particular interest in long-term linguistic changes, and the role of language contact and language standardization. She has written more than 25 books on these subjects, and hundreds of articles.
The visiting professor for the academic year 2022-2023 was Frank van Vree (1954), emeritus professor of History of War, Conflict and Memory Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam and associated researcher at the NIOD Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam. In 2022 he was also Senior Research Fellow at the Moritz Stern Institute for Intellectual History, Modern Jewish Studies and Enlightenment Culture of the Universität Göttingen.
Van Vree studied modern history and philosophy at the University of Groningen and received his PhD from the University of Leiden. Previously he also held a chair in Media History at the Erasmus University (Rotterdam). In 2010-2011 he was visiting scholar at New York University and, previously, visiting professor at various other institutes abroad. His research and publications articles - in scholarly journals as well as newspapers and weeklies – focus on two main fields: history and memory of war and violence in the 20th century and the history of Dutch media and journalism culture.
Until last year Van Vree was director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2016-2021). Previously he had been Dean of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam (2012-2016) and Professor of Media Studies (2001-2016). Together with prof. José van Dijck he laid the foundations of the now famous Medias Studies department as well as its Journalism program of the Amsterdam university.
As NIOD director Van Vree had the final responsibility over the program Independence, Decolonisation, Violence and War in Indonesia 1945-1950, a joint project of the NIOD, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH). This research program focused on the use of extreme violence by the Dutch armed forces during the Indonesian War of Independence, the consequences it had, and the extent to which political and legal responsibility was taken for the extreme violence both at the time and later, all viewed in a wider historical, political and international context. The research was conducted by thirty Dutch academics, in parallel with two international projects: a project by the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) with eleven Indonesian researchers, and a project with six international experts, resulting in in fourteen separate studies in total, some in various languages. The final conclusions of the program were presented on 17 February 2022, generating great attention in the media as well as political debates; it also led to official apologies by the Dutch government to the Indonesian people for the widespread use of extreme violence during that war.
Van Vree’s work in the field of history, memory and historical culture dates back to the early 1990’s, leading to a path-breaking study on the memory of the Second World War, In de schaduw van Auschwitz. Herinneringen, beelden, geschiedenis (‘In the shadow of Auschwitz. Memories, Images, History’; 1995). Together with Rob van der Laarse (UvA) he initiated a major research program, The Dynamics of War Heritage, Memory and Remembrance, which was granted eleven research positions in 2008-2009 by NWO and ten (semi)public and private funds.
Over the years Van Vree published a great number of books and articles on the history of Dutch media and journalism as well as a number of essays and articles in the field of historical representation and historical culture, in scholarly journals as well as newspapers and weeklies, among them the leading newspaper de Volkskrant and the weekly de Groene Amsterdammer; he was one of the founders and editors of Feit & fictie, a journal on the history of representation (1991-1997). He was co-editor of important scholarly volumes, such as History of Concepts - Comparative Perspectives (AUP Amsterdam 1998; also in Chinese translation) and Performing the Past, Memory, History, and Identity in modern Europe (with Jay Winter and Karin Tilmans, AUP Amsterdam 2010).
Over the years Frank van Vree has been a member of numerous boards and committees, both in academia and in society. He was the driving force of the project Quality and Relevance in the Humanities, which successfully developed assessment standards that would do justice to the nature of humanities research; subsequently he was appointed member of the committee that designed the national Strategy Evaluation Protocol 2021-2027 for all universities and research institutes in the Netherlands.
Outside academia he was, among others, member of the board of the prestigious Praemium Erasmianum (2007-2015), the Netherlands Press Museum (2002-2009), the Amsterdam Expertise Centre of Journalism (2009-2013), the National Biography Series (1995-2003) and the National Cultural Broadcast Fund (Mediafonds 2001-2005).
The visiting professor for the sixth edition (2023-2024) of the King Willem-Alexander Chair for Dutch Studies was Margriet van der Waal, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Groningen, where she is also Director of Studies for the Erasmus Mundus master's programme Euroculture. She also holds the Chair in South African Literature, Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam, endowed by the Stichting Zuid-Afrikahuis Nederland.
In her research, Van der Waal analyses European and South African cultural imaginaries (colonial and postcolonial) and the ways in which these imaginaries are inscribed in the public sphere. Her focus is on how these cultural expressions can be understood as part of the politics of recognising rights and negotiating social subject positions. Van der Waal’s research combines several disciplines and approaches, while explicitly seeking collaboration with the cultural sector and social and artistic partners.
Van der Waal, Margriet. “A letter to Jan van Riebeeck: (new) Afrikaans poets in conversation with Europe and its legacies of settler colonialism in South Africa”. Complit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society, (2023), volume 2.6: 69-89.
Van der Waal, Margriet. "The Right to Speak: The Cultural Archive and the Public Sphere in South Africa." Narrative Values, the Value of Narrative. Barend van Heusden and Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar (Eds.). (2024). De Gruyter.
Van der Waal, Margriet. "Dirty Politics: The Stories of Soap in South Africa." Frontiers of Narrative Studies, (2023), volume 8.2: 206-223. https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2022-2021
Van der Waal, Margriet. "Enticed to settle elsewhere: Magic lantern slides and the transnational creation of European colonial citizens”. Journal of European Studies, volume 52.3-4 (2022), pp. 289-313. DOI: 10.1177/00472441221115
Van der Waal, Margriet. "Rewarding an Imagined South Africa: Literary Prizes in South Africa before and after 1994." Literary Prizes and Cultural Transfer. Edited by Petra Broomans, Mathijs Sanders and Jeanette den Toonder. Studies in Cultural Transfer & Transmission, Volume 9. Barkhuis, 2021, pp. 131-158. ISBN 9789493194380
Van der Waal, Margriet. "13 Uur van Deon Meyer as leidraad vir sosiale identiteit in a stedelike konteks: om 'n burger in Kaapstad te wees en daar tuis te hoort.” Tydskrif vir Nederlands & Afrikaans. 24.1 (2017): 53-68
Absent Presences: Critical Viewings of Items in the Collections of the Zuid-Afrikahuis.Barbara Henkes, André Paijmans and Margriet van der Waal (eds.) (2024). Volume 3 in Zuid-Afrikahuis Series, Amsterdam: Stichting Zuid-Afrikahuis.
Heritage and the making of ‘Europe’. Special issue (double issue) for Journal of European Studies on European cultural heritage, Astrid Van Weyenberg, Sabine Volk and Margriet van der Waal (eds.). (2022). Volume 52.3-4 (international, peer-reviewed). https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jesa/52/3-4.
Magic Visions. Portraying and Inventing South Africa with Lantern Slides. Edited by Jeltsje Stobbe, Rosa Deen and Margriet van der Waal. Stichting Zuid-Afrikahuis, 2022. ISBN: 978 90 830385 3 7 (https://www.zuidafrikahuis.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/MAGIC-VISIONS-Portraying-and-inventing-South-Africa-with-lantern-slides_114mb.pdf) (non peer-reviewed)
NOTA BENE: This publication won the annual Mervyn Heard Award 2020 (of the Magic Lantern Society, UK)
