Joep Leerssen

Joseph Theodoor "Joep" Leerssen(born 12 June 1955,Leiden) is a Dutchcomparatistandcultural historian.He isprofessorofEuropean studiesat theUniversity of Amsterdam,where he also holds aRoyal Netherlands AcademyResearch Professorship. He was awarded theSpinozapremiein 2008.

Joep Leerssen

Life

Leerssen studiedComparative literatureinAachen(M.A. 1979) and Anglo-Irish Studies atUniversity College Dublin(M.A. 1980), and received his doctorate fromUtrecht Universityin 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 inHarvard(Erasmus Chair), Cambridge (Magdalene College) andGöttingen.He headed the Huizinga Institute,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 andnationalism,and on the historical development ofculturalandromantic nationalismin nineteenth-century Europe, using literary texts as a source for the history of ideas. His booksMere Irish & Fíor-Ghael(1986, repr. 1996) andRemembrance and Imagination(1996) deal with the pre-1800 and 19th-century emergence of an Irishnational identity;Imagology(co-edited with Manfred Beller, 2007) is a handbook on the literary articulation ofstereotypesof national characters;National Thought in Europea survey of the culture-historical growth of nationalism in Europe. In the field ofnationalism studies,Leerssen takes up an intermediary position between the approaches ofethnosymbolismand 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 ofRomantic historicism,came to be mistaken for long-standing ethnic continuities. Additionally, national identities always take shape by opposing thenationto 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. Within The Netherlands, Leerssen was involved in the official recognition ofLimburgishas aregional language;he has written literary work in Limburgish.

In 2008 Leerssen was elected member of theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest (2014).

Leerssen is married to the Irish cultural historianAnn Rigney;they have two children.

Selected publications

• (1984)Komparatistik in Grossbritannien
• (1986)Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael
• (1995)Historische verkenning van Mheer(with Wim Senden)
• (1996)Remembrance and Imagination
• (2006)National Thought in Europe
• (2006)De bronnen van het vaderland
• (2007)Imagology(edited, with Manfred Beller)
• (2008)Editing the Nation's Memory(edited, with Dirk Van Hulle)
• (2009)The Rhetoric of National Character(special issue, edited with Ton Hoenselaars, of theEuropean Journal of English Studies)
• (2011)Spiegelpaleis Europa
• (2014)Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe(edited, withAnn Rigney)
• (2015)Nationalisme
• (2018)Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe(editor)
• (2018)The Rhine(edited, with Manfred Beller)
• (2019)Comparative Literature in Britain

External links

• Amsterdam University staff homepage
• Personal homepage
• Imagology website
• Comparative nationalism research website