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. 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.
Professor Leerssen was also one of the fourteen 'Visiting Professors' of the University of Liège appointed on the occasion of the Bicentenary.
He delivered his inaugural lecture on 6 October 2017 as part of the conference “'Between Union and Fragmentation': Language, Culture and Politics in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands”.
You can watch a video recording of his lecture, entitled "The Nationalization of Language” below.
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).
Joseph Theodoor Leerssen gave a lecture at the University of Liège on 6 October 2017 on the occasion of the conference " ‘Between Union and Fragmentation’: Language, Culture and Politics in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (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 is 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 is 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.
