UCL Dutch

How did the large and cultural powerful countries Britain, France, and Germany influence public debates in smaller countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg?

The School of European Languages, Culture and Society at UCL, in Partnership with Poet in the City, is delighted to present an important new series celebrating the very best of contemporary European poetry. The Contemporary European Poets series brings to London celebrated poets from Hungary, Holland, France, Germany, the Faroe Islands and Italy, for showcase events at Europe House. Events will include live readings by the poets, with all poems read both in the original language and in brand new specially commissioned English translations. On 30 May Ester Naomi Perquin will take part in the event on Dutch poetry at Europe House. 

Analyzing Discourses of Culture in a Context of Policy and Reform

UCL SELCS/Dutch Research Seminar – all welcome!

What is experimental fiction? Concepts, Metaphors and the Case of the Postwar Neo-Avant-Garde in the Low Countries

A new year always provides an occasion for looking back and taking stock as well as for making plans for the future. After the first four annual volumes with Maney we can summarise that the 11 issues published between 2009 and 2012 (out of which three were guest-edited special issues) consisted of 58 journal articles by 60 contributors from 14 different countries, not including book reviews and editorial columns. The country ranking list, perhaps unsurprisingly, is headed by the Netherlands with 15 contributors, followed by the United States with 10, the United Kingdom with 8 and Belgium with 6 authors. On a higher level it can be said that just short of half of all contributions (28) came from the Anglophone world (apart from the US and UK, from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa), a third from inside the Low Countries (21), and the rest from other European countries like Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Israel (9). This reflects very well Dutch Crossing’s special focus on contacts and exchanges between the Anglophone and Dutch-speaking worlds through the centuries while also including other aspects of Low Countries Studies. In addition there were 15 book reviews, mainly from the UK, US and the Netherlands.

The UCL Department of Dutch is organising the Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal (CNaVT) exams in April–May 2013. The CNaVT is the official, international exam of Dutch as a Foreign Language by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union, the Dutch-Flemish-Surinamese equivalent to the British Council).

Did you study Dutch at UCL, recently or ages ago? We invite all alumni of the department to stay in touch by joining this group, free of any obligation.

Concepts, Metaphors and the Case of the Postwar Neo-Avant-Garde in the Low Countries

Lars Bernaerts, Professor for Literary Theory at the Free University of Brussels, will be a visiting scholar at the UCL Department of Dutch in term II and III. His research focuses on experimental fiction and methods of textual analysis (classical and postclassical narratology, speech-act theory). His research project at UCL will focus on the Dutch and Flemish Neo-Avant-Garde of the 1960s and 1970s.

Stefanie van Gemert, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature and Teaching Assistant at the Dutch department, will be teaching three half-an-hour sessions at the Wallace Collection on Saturday, 12 January (11am, 1pm and 3pm).

Her talks will be on 'Dutch Golden Age Art and Diversity', with a specific focus on the history of the Dutch East India Company and its influence on material and cultural wealth in the Dutch Republic.
Stefanie's talks are part of the Wallace Collection's 'Day in the Seventeenth Century', the final event of the HLF-sponsored community project 'Treasures from the East'. This project celebrated the refurbishment of the Wallace Collection's renowned East Galleries with Dutch art.

The events on Saturday are free (suggested donation £2) and promise to be entertaining for all age groups. There will be baroque music and dress performances; you can paint your own Delft Blue tiles and there are plenty of talks on Dutch art. Just walk in on the day and admire the newly-transformed East Galleries.

The Wallace Collection is one of the national museums, close to UCL (just off Oxford Street: Bond Street tube). The museum is free and has an outstanding collection of Dutch old master paintings by, for example, Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Pieter de Hooch.

Stefanie van Gemert, PhD candidate and Teaching Assistant in the department, curated an exhibition (with accompanying digital display) for UCL Special Collections. The exhibition Journeys East is now on view in the Main Library until Feb 2013, on the landing between the newly reopened Flaxman Gallery and the Donaldson Reading Room.

It gives us pleasure to be able to report that Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, after having been included in the ISI Thomson-Reuters Web of Science, arguably the most important set of citation indexes and bibliographic databases, for two years now, in July 2012 has had its first ‘Impact factor’ calculated.  For those who are less familiar with, or skeptical about, ‘bibliometrical’ indicators, the impact factor of a journal in any given year is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years, and generally considered to be one of the most important metrics in research assessment.

6 top writers from the Low Countries on tour to 6 cities for 6 nights of readings & debates to showcase the best high impact literature from Flanders & the Netherlands in English translation with a final gala gathering in London of authors from both the UK & the Low Countries

UCL Dutch is a recognised Examinations Centre for the Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal, the official, international exam of Dutch as a Foreign Language by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union, the Dutch-Flemish-Surinamese equivalent to the British Council).

The Wolfson Foundation seeks to support excellence. Drawing on its history of support for higher education and interest in the humanities, the Foundation is offering 3 postgraduate research awards in the humanities. These will be for 3 areas in history, literature and languages.

Convenors: Anne Goldgar (KCL), Ben Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL)

The Low Countries history research seminars meet on Friday afternoons in the Institute of Historical Research at 5:15 pm. Please note: due to ongoing refurbishment work at the IHR, seminars this year we will meet in alternative locations (SH Court = Senate House, Court Room, located in the South Block on the 1st floor; ST B2 = Stewart House, adjacent to Senate House, at 32 Russell Square, room 2 in the basement).

The Poetry Cafe 22 Betterton Street London WC2H 9BX
Wednesday 26 September at 7.30 pm Tickets at the door: £5

The Dutch Department at UCL recently hosted an extremely successful four-day intensive workshop focusing on literary translation from Dutch into English. It enabled undergraduate and graduate students as well as recent Dutch studies alumni from four British universities to work together with an acclaimed Flemish writer and three distinguished professional translators, while meeting also first-hand with a literary editor and a representative from the British Centre for Literary Translation.

Regular readers will have noticed gradual changes in the editorial board of Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies over the past couple of issues. Partly necessitated by generational change we have started to restructure the board to give additional weight to the global aspects of Dutch Studies as reflected in Dutch Crossing and the manifold exchanges between the Dutch-speaking and Anglo-phone worlds in particular.

This summer Stefanie van Gemert (Comparative Literature PhD student and Teaching Assistant at the Dutch department) is running four workshops at the Wallace Collection and the UCL Art Museum on Dutch seventeenth-century art and the history of the Dutch East India Company.

New website launched for the campaign for languages

Speak to the future – the campaign for languages - has launched a brand new website at www.speaktothefuture.org.

We are delighted to announce that Dutch Crossing has received its first Impact Factor in ISI’s Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The results have just been released.

Nick Piercey will be taking part in a UCL BiteSized lecture (2 speakers, 15 minutes each) on Dutch Football in the early 20th Century.

UCL Dutch aims to reward academic excellence among new students of its postgraduate programme by offering a study expense bursary for new students starting the MA in Dutch Studies in September 2012. The bursary covers up to £600 towards study expenses like books, research travel and other research related expenses.

When Jacques Presser’s Ondergang (1965, in English: Ashes in the Wind : The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, 1968) first appeared, twenty years after the end of World War II, the book hit Dutch society like a bomb. What people knew in general but had forgotten, passed over in silence or repressed during two decades, was here described in every gruesome detail: the systematic humiliation, isolation, despoliation, and extermination of Dutch Jewry.

UCL Dutch has been recognised as an Examinations Centre for the Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal, the official, international exam of Dutch as a Foreign Language by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union, the Dutch-Flemish-Surinamese equivalent to the British Council).

After two special issues on new approaches in Netherlandic art history, for which we would like to thank Christine P. Sellin from the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS) heartily for her meticulous guest-editing, this first issue of Dutch Crossing in 2012 is a ‘regular’ issue without an over-coupling theme. This is not to say that no connections could be made between the individual contributions, quite on the contrary.

A FREE FESTIVAL at: Serpentine Bar and Kitchen from 9-5pm and at the Kensington Gore Hotel from 5pm until late.

The Anglo-Netherlands Society has created these awards to recognize and reward outstanding work in the field of Dutch Studies at UK universities. The Society promotes the social, artistic, literary, educational, scientific and other non-political interests common to the UK and the Netherlands.

In the light of the important new element in REF2014 that is Impact, in the shape of the impact  statement and impact case studies, the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies (IGRS) is proposing a regular series of workshops for colleagues in Modern Languages to come together to discuss their ideas and strategies. All colleagues in Modern Languages are welcome to attend these events, and we would also appreciate further offers, from throughout the UK, of talks/case studies to discuss at future workshops.On this occasion we welcome the following, who will speak for 15 minutes in this order, followed by discussion:

Dirk Schoenaers, Research Associate at UCL French, has won the 2011 Prize in the early career researcher category with an article on ‘The Middle Dutch Translation of Froissart’s Chronicle (c. 1450): Historiography in the Vernacular and the Ruling Elite of Holland’.

A panel discussion with Abdelkader Benali (Netherlands) and Hisham Matar (Libya) chaired by Jo Glanville (Index on Censorship)

Got a question on Dutch literature or just curious to know? On the 11th January members of the Dutch department will be holding an hour live hang out from 2–3pm on Twitter. Just follow Litro magazine (#litromagazine) on Twitter and get your questions answered and your curiosity satisfied.

The excellent employment prospects of graduates with Dutch and intercultural skills, as taught by the department (see Careers with Dutch) have been corroborated by the recent report on “Labour Market Intelligence on Languages and Intercultural Skills in Higher Education” by Sean Mulkerne & Anne Marie Graham (May 2011), commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the University Council for Modern Languages (UCML).

Ulrich Tiedau has been appointed a UCL Knowledge Transfer and Enterprise Champion for 2012. This part-time appointment was made by the Office of the Vice-Provost (Enterprise) and is financed by the Higher Education Innovation Fund. 

The November 2011 issue of Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies focuses on Crossing Boundaries and Transforming Identities: New Perspectives in Netherlandic Studies. Guest-edited by Christine Petra Sellin from the California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA, it comprises of select art history papers from the fifteenth biennial Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies, held at UCLA in Los Angeles in June 2010.

Ulrich Tiedau (UCL Dutch) has been elected to the Executive committee of the University Council for Modern Languages (UCML), as representative for Area Studies.

Etty is a touring one-woman theatrical play based on the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum, adapted and performed by Susan Stein. Directed by Austin Pendleton. Using only Etty Hillesum’s words, Susan Stein’s adaptation brings us to 1943 when Etty, a young Jewish woman, is about to be deported out of Holland.

Convenors: Anne Goldgar (KCL), Ben Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL)

The Low Countries history research seminars meet on Friday afternoons in the Institute of Historical Research at 5 pm. Please note: due to refurbishment work at the IHR, seminars this year we will meet in alternative locations (SH = Senate House: room 104 (Torrington Room), in the South Block on the 1st floor; ST = Stewart House, adjacent to Senate House, at 32 Russell Square, on the 2nd floor).

The UCL Dutch and Flemish Society welcomes everyone! Do you have a Dutch or Flemish background? Are you studying Dutch? Or are you just interested in Dutch and Flemish culture?

Abdelkader Benali, one of the Netherlands’ leading writers will be Dutch Writer in Residence 2011/12. The Writer in Residence, supported by the Nederlands Letterenfonds, will engage with students and staff in the department and actively contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.

The June 2011 issue of Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies focuses on Crossing Boundaries and Transforming Identities: New Perspectives in Netherlandic Studies. Guest-edited by Christine Petra Sellin from the California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA, it comprises of select art history papers from the fifteenth biennial Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies, held at UCLA in Los Angeles in June 2010.

Visit us on the UCL Open Day on 30 June 2011.

The revised lists of the European Science Foundation’s European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) have been published and Dutch Crossing : Journal of Low Countries Studies, edited at the UCL Dutch department, has made the leap into the highest category INT1 "International publications with high visibility and influence among researchers in the various research domains in different countries, regularly cited all over the world." on the list for history. Lists for art history and other subjects will be published later this year.

Nicholas Piercey, finishing PhD student at UCL Dutch, will give a lecture in the Institute for Historical Research's Sports and Leisure History Seminar series on:

Football Club Membership in Rotterdam in 1914: Walking through the Historic City in Search of the Individual

23 May 2011, 5.15pm in the IHR Pollard Room. Missed it? You can listen to the podcast. 

When four centuries and three decades ago the Low Countries formally declared their independence from the Habsburg monarchy, there can be little doubt about the central role played by William of Nassau, Prince of Orange (1533–1584), in the English-speaking world sometimes better known as William the Silent. His Apology (1580) paved the way for the following Act of Abjuration (1581), declaring the forfeiture of Philip II’s right to rule over the Low Countries. Similar to William’s leadership in the rebellion his and subsequently his sons Maurice’s and Frederick Henry’s, role for the forming of the Dutch nation is uncontested and visible not only in the honorary title pater patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’) bestowed on William by his compatriots during his lifetime, but also commemorated in the national anthem of the Netherlands, the Wilhelmus, to the present day.

UCL Dutch, as part of the VirtualDutch initiative, a collaboration of UCL and the universities of Sheffield, Cambridge and Nottingham, offers tutor-supported Dutch language courses that are entirely taught over the internet.

In this workshop in the Painless Introduction series, Simon Mahony and Ulrich Tiedau will discuss the promise, potential and challenges presented by new initiatives in the construction and delivery of open educational resources (OER). 

Nicholas Piercey, completing research student in the Department of Dutch, will give a talk about Football in two Dutch Cities, 1910-1920: A personal history of a PhD. Nick’s research aims to provide a representation of the culture surrounding football in the two cities during this time, incorporating studies of the media, concepts of football-morality, town planning, education and sporting development and the individual.

He will be presenting some of the main findings of his research and reflecting on the process of researching and writing up a doctoral thesis. All welcome, including students contemplating PhD research.

Wednesday 9 February at 4pm in room 111, Foster Court

Professor Reinier Salverda, Director of the Fryske Akademy, KNAW (Frisian Academy, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science) will speak on Choosing one’s words when translating a political novel.
Research Seminar Series, UCL Dutch, 2010/11, term II

Edited by Jane Fenoulhet and Cristina Ros i Solé

For most language learners, mobility is now the starting-point rather than the end-point of language learning. Rather than learning a language in order to go abroad, learners are used to moving from country to country, from culture to culture. This volume of essays explores the different attitudes to language learning generated by globalisation and shows how the local still has an impact on the language-learning classroom. The contributors have collaborated through the Languages of the Wider World Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning based at University College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies. The essays in the book span both reflection on language learners’ shifting identities and the pedagogies of a range of less widely taught languages in which the national language has acquired fresh emphasis in the context of globalisation. How might the tension between mobility and localisation best be exploited to the benefit of language learners?

The book will be launched at 5.30pm on Thursday 20 January 2011
in room G24, Foster Court (ground floor) – UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
RSVP: c.ros@ucl.ac.uk by Monday 17 January 2011