Biography

Joep Leerssen

I am Professor of Modern European Literature in the department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. In addition I hold a part-time research professorship at Maastricht University, where I work on the transnational aspects of the culture and history of the Limburg region.

A comparatist by formation, I study post-1800 cultural history mainly as a transnational circulation of ideas and mentalities; the emphasis is on literary and discursive sources, which I analyse in their rhetoric and poetics as well as historically. My research interests are:

• nationalism and the history of national movements
• the survival of 19th-century cultural nationalism as 20th-century banal nationalism and 21st-century ethnopopulism
• the rhetoric and history of cultural and national stereotyping and ethnic characterization (“imagology”)
• the history of border regions and cultural minorities, especially in the Low Countries
• the history of the humanities since 1800, especially philology
• digital humanities: the database-assisted capture, analysis and visualization of complex communicative networks, cultural practices and ideological diffusion patterns

More information: https://leerssen.nl/ or https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joep_Leerssen