Joseph Theodoor "Joep" Leerssen (born 12 June 1955,

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wi ...

) is a Dutch comparatist and

cultural historian Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past matter, encompassing the ...

. He is

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

European studies European studies is a field of study offered by many academic colleges and universities that focuses on current developments in European integration. Some programmes offer a social science or public administration curriculum focusing on develop ...

at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being ...

, where he also holds a Royal Netherlands Academy Research Professorship. He was awarded the

Spinozapremie The Spinoza Prize ( nl, Spinozapremie) is an annual award of 2.5 million euro, to be spent on new research given by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The award is the highest scientific award in the Netherlands. It is named after the philosopher ...

in 2008. Joep LeerssenLeerssen studied

Comparative literature Comparative literature 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 ...

in Aachen (M.A. 1979) and Anglo-Irish Studies at

University College Dublin University College Dublin (commonly referred to as UCD) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a member institution of the National University of Ireland. With 33,284 student ...

(M.A. 1980), and received his doctorate from

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollme ...

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 Magdalene College ( ) is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mar ...

) and

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

. 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 and

nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...

, 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 National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or to one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language". National identity ...

; ''Imagology'' (co-edited with Manfred Beller, 2007) is a handbook on the literary articulation of

stereotypes In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example ...

of national characters; ''National Thought in Europe'' a survey of the culture-historical growth of nationalism in Europe. In the field of

nationalism studies Nationalism studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of nationalism and related issues. While nationalism has been the subject of scholarly discussion since at least the late eighteenth century, it is only since the e ...

, Leerssen takes up an intermediary position between the approaches of

ethnosymbolism Ethnosymbolism is a school of thought in the study of nationalism that stresses the importance of symbols, myths, values and traditions in the formation and persistence of the modern nation state. As a critique of modernist theories of nation ...

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. Additionally, national identities always take shape by opposing the

nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective Identity (social science), identity of a group of people unde ...

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. Within The Netherlands, Leerssen was involved in the official recognition of Limburgish as a

regional language * A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area. Internationally, for the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Lan ...

; he has written literary work in Limburgish. In 2008 Leerssen was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest (2014). Leerssen is married to the Irish cultural historian Ann 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 the '' European Journal of English Studies'') * (2011) ''Spiegelpaleis Europa'' * (2014) ''Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe'' (edited, with Ann Rigney) * (2015) ''Nationalisme'' * (2018
''Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe''
(editor) * (2018) ''The Rhine'' (edited, with Manfred Beller) * (2019) ''Comparative Literature in Britain''

Notes

External links

Personal homepage

Imagology website

Comparative nationalism research website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leerssen, Joep 1955 births Living people 20th-century Dutch historians Dutch literary historians Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences People from Leiden Spinoza Prize winners University of Amsterdam faculty 21st-century Dutch historians