About

Learn more about the UCL Low Countries Centre.

History

The study of Dutch history, language and culture has a long and distinguished past at UCL. It began in 1919 with the founding of a Chair of Dutch History and the establishment of a Department of Dutch.

Since then, its remit has expanded to the entire Low Countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg as well as the Netherlands. Today, it includes a full programme of research, teaching, publications, and events. The centre’s location at UCL in London provides direct access to:

  • Massive collections of Dutch books, manuscripts, prints, and maps that rival, in some cases, those in Amsterdam, The Hague and Brussels
  • Dutch and Flemish art collections with major masterpieces at the National Gallery and several other museums
  • The largest Dutch-language library of any UK university
  • A concentration of expertise that is unique in the Anglophone world.

Previous occupants of the Chair in Dutch History have produced path-breaking, fundamental work on a wide range of topics in Low Countries History, including the Dutch Revolt, Anglo-Dutch relations, political theory, Dutch commerce, Dutch-Jewish history, and the early Enlightenment.

Mission

The mission of the UCL Low Countries Centre is to study a series of historic relationships and to nurture their further development in the present day:

  • Connections between the Low Countries and neighbouring lands, including most importantly Great Britain
  • Encounters between diverse groups, religions, and cultures within the Low Countries themselves
  • Interactions of Dutch-speaking people around the globe, wherever Dutch language and culture have had or currently have an impact.

The centre draws on the methodologies and insights of a range of intellectual disciplines, including:

  • Border Studies
  • Spatial Turn in History
  • Transnational History
  • Translation Studies
  • Comparative Literary Studies
  • Area Studies (most notably the North Sea as a unit)
  • Migration Studies
  • Postcolonial Studies.

Our remit extends to the entire historic region of the Low Countries, sometimes referred to as the Benelux countries: The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. In addition, it extends to the places around the globe where Dutch-speaking peoples have lived or currently live, including parts of the Americas, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Through research, teaching and outreach the Centre focuses especially on the study of encounters, interactions, connections, exchanges and networks involving the Low Countries and their language and culture. It seeks to address the issues arising from such relationships in both past and present - issues of conflict and toleration, diversity and integration, mobility and community, negotiation and exchange, and intercultural interaction, with particular attention to exchanges between the Dutch and Anglophone worlds.

Activities

Activities hosted by the Centre or affiliated with it include the following:

  • An annual seminar series: the Low Countries Seminar, held at the Institute for Historical Research
  • An annual lecture by a high-profile scholar: the Pieter Geyl Memorial Lectures
  • An MA programme: the MA in the Dutch Golden Age, run by UCL and offered on an interdisciplinary, intercollegiate basis
  • Publication of ‘Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies’
  • Hosting of visiting academics
  • Annual study days

The centre works in co-operation with the Dutch Centre recently established in the City of London to develop new common activities and contribute to each other’s programmes.

This website aims to serve as a hub of information on Low Countries Studies and cultural activities in London.

Professor Lisa Jardine: Sir Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens - Anglo-Dutch Science and Politics around 1688. Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, 17 March 2014.

The Gustave Tuck lecture theatre was full last week for the official launch of UCL’s new Centre for Low Countries Studies, with the Centre’s spirit of fostering exchange and interaction in full flow.

Academics and students from London universities as well as Cambridge and Sheffield attended the event, together with representatives from the Dutch and Belgian embassies, Flanders House and the Dutch Language Union. Guests were welcomed by Professor Jo Wolff, UCL’s Dean of Arts and Humanities, and had a chance to chat and forge new links at the lively reception which followed in the North Cloisters.

The opening lecture was given by Professor Lisa Jardine on the scientific and other connections between Sir Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens at the time of the so-called Glorious Revolution - which, as she observed, was neither very glorious nor very revolutionary, but rather a Dutch invasion that brought the stadholder William III of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart from the Dutch Republic to the English throne. 

Illustrating the invasion with eyewitness accounts of the magnificent Dutch fleet setting out from Holland and sailing through the Channel between the white cliffs of England and Calais, Lisa Jardine focused on the way the Dutch took over not just London but its whole machinery of state and court, and on the Dutch inner circle around William III.

Professor Jardine drew on unpublished material concerning the protagonists, from letters, diaries and other contemporary records held both in Britain and in the Netherlands, to describe in an almost day-to-day narrative how Christiaan Huygens at first followed the Dutch invasion in The Hague through letters from his brother Constantijn, the stadholder’s secretary; then went over to London himself, where he attended meetings of the Royal Society, sought preferment for himself at court, and lobbied the King for his friend Newton to be made Master of Trinity College in Cambridge; and later returned to and continued to live and work in The Hague.

The personal connections between Newton and Huygens involved not just their scientific pursuits and experiments, discussion of Newton’s Principia, its mathematics, and other new experiments in the field of chemistry and optics, but also their friendship and mutual understanding, and mundane affairs such as job-seeking and Royal Society infighting. 

Much of this Lisa Jardine illustrated using little-known sources - in Dutch, French, English, Latin and in code - that await study by scholars taking seriously the field of Low Countries Studies and Anglo-Dutch relations.

Such cross-disciplinary investigation, as Lisa Jardine maintained, can contribute much to our knowledge and understanding of the early modern cultural, social, economic, political and scientific relations between the Netherlands and Great Britain. 

As she demonstrated very clearly, the contact between Newton and Huygens constitutes a pivotal episode at the beginning of modern science. Newton’s star continued to rise ever after. And imagine - as Lisa Jardine, in closing, invited the audience to do - what if Christiaan Huygens had not been refused a London position by King William? What impact might their cooperation in the Royal Society have had on the further development of modern science?

The mission of the UCL Centre for Low Countries Studies is to study a series of historic relationships like these and to nurture their further development in the present day.