Joseph Theodoor "Joep" Leerssen (born 12 June 1955, Leiden) is a Dutch comparatist and cultural historian. He is professor of European studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he also holds a Royal Netherlands Academy Research Professorship. He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 2008. [1]
Leerssen studied Comparative literature in Aachen (M.A. 1979) and Anglo-Irish Studies at University College Dublin (M.A. 1980), and received his doctorate from Utrecht University in 1986. He was appointed lecturer in European Studies in Amsterdam in 1986 and was given a professorial chair in the same subject in 1991. In addition, he has held guest professorships and visiting fellowships in Harvard (Erasmus Chair), Cambridge (Magdalene College) and Göttingen. He headed the Huizinga Institute, [2] the Dutch National Research Institute for Cultural History, from 1996 until 2005.
Leerssen has worked in the fields of Irish Studies, imagology and European studies. His main research focus is on the relationship between national (self-)stereotyping and nationalism, and on the historical development of cultural and romantic nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe, using literary texts as a source for the history of ideas. His books Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael (1986, repr. 1996) and Remembrance and Imagination (1996) deal with the pre-1800 and 19th-century emergence of an Irish national identity; Imagology (co-edited with Manfred Beller, 2007) is a handbook on the literary articulation of stereotypes of national characters; National Thought in Europe a survey of the culture-historical growth of nationalism in Europe. [3] In the field of nationalism studies, Leerssen takes up an intermediary position between the approaches of ethnosymbolism and modernism, stressing "the long memory and the short history" of nationalism. While emphasizing the agency of culture in the rise and spread of nationalism, he considers this culture to consist of a set of literary myths and stereotypes which only in modern times, under the influence of Romantic historicism, came to be mistaken for long-standing ethnic continuities. [4] Additionally, national identities always take shape by opposing the nation to a (historically changeable) variety of stereotyped foreigners; Leerssen defines nationalism as the "political instrumentalization" of such self/other-stereotypes. Since nationalism always involves an oppositional dynamics between different societies, and can therefore never be adequately comprehended on a single-country basis, Leerssen pleads for a rigorously transnational, comparative approach. [5] Within The Netherlands, Leerssen was involved in the official recognition of Limburgish as a regional language; he has written literary work in Limburgish.
In 2008 Leerssen was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. [6] He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest (2014). [7]
Leerssen is married to the Irish cultural historian Ann Rigney; they have two children.
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Romantic nationalism is the form of nationalism in which the state claims its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes such factors as language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs of the nation in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture. It can be applied to ethnic nationalism as well as civic nationalism. Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).
Comparative literature studies is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study of international relations but works with languages and artistic traditions, so as to understand cultures 'from the inside'". While most frequently practised with works of different languages, comparative literature may also be performed on works of the same language if the works originate from different nations or cultures in which that language is spoken.
Gerhard "George" Lachmann Mosse was a German-American social and cultural historian, who emigrated from Nazi Germany to Great Britain and then to the United States. He was professor of history at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and also in Israel, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Best known for his studies of Nazism, he authored more than 25 books on topics as diverse as constitutional history, Protestant theology, and the history of masculinity. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary History, which they co-edited.
Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.
Thomas Colley Grattan was an Irish novelist, poet, historian and diplomat. Born in Dublin, he was educated for the law, but did not practise. He wrote a few novels, including The Heiress of Bruges ; but his best work was Highways and Byways, a description of his Continental travels, of which he published three series, amounting to eight volumes. He also wrote a history of the Netherlands and books on America. He was for some time British Consul at Boston in the United States and assisted in the negotiations leading to the Webster–Ashburton Treaty in 1842.
Jan Marius Nicolas Romein was a Dutch historian, journalist, literary scholar and professor of history at the University of Amsterdam. A Marxist and a student of Huizinga, Romein is remembered for his popularizing books of Dutch national history, jointly authored with his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor. His work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Indonesian and Japanese.
Anthony David Stephen Smith was a British historical sociologist who, at the time of his death, was Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
Vytautas Kavolis was a Lithuanian sociologist, literary critic, and culture historian.
The Leidse Rijn is a canal in the province of Utrecht, Netherlands.
Henk Wesseling was a Dutch historian. He was a professor of contemporary history at Leiden University, former rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study between 1995 and 2002.
Katie Trumpener is the Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University. She won a Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and Berlin Prize.
Peter van der Veer is a Dutch academic who is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany. He has taught anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the University of Pennsylvania. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe.
Prof. Miroslav Hroch is a Czech historian and political theorist and a professor at the Charles University in Prague.
Siniša Malešević, MRIA, MAE is Full Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University College, Dublin, Ireland. He is also a Senior Fellow and Associate Researcher at Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM), Paris, France.
Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity at Western Sydney University, and Director of the Institute for Culture and Society where he has been since 2014. He is a writer on global politics, globalization, sustainability, and social theory.
Proinsias Mac Cana was an academic and Celtic scholar. He held professorships at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and University College Dublin.
Imagology is a branch of comparative literature. More specifically, it is concerned with "the study of cross-national perceptions and images as expressed in literary discourse". While it adopts a constructivist perspective on national stereotypes and national character, it does emphasize that these stereotypes may have real social effects. It was developed in the 1950s with practitioners in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. It never gained much of a foothold in anglophone academia. This may be attributed to imagology's skewed relationship to Edward Said's influential Orientalism, which is much better known in this context.
Ann Rigney is an Irish/Dutch cultural scholar and Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the transnational interaction between narrative and cultural memory and is authoritative in the field of Memory Studies.
Johannes Andreas Jolles, known as André Jolles was a Dutch-German art historian, literary critic and linguist who was affiliated with the Nazi Party. He is best known for his work Simple Forms.
Daniela Merolla is a Professor in Amazigh / Berber Literature and Art at the INALCO, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales. Her work investigates intertextuality and multilingualism in African oral and written literatures, cinema, and websites. She developed the notion of “Amazigh/Berber literary space”.
