The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has announced the 2008 winner of the prestigious NWO-Spinoza Prize. He is J Th (Joep) Leerssen, Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. The NWO-Spinoza Prize, worth €1.5 million and known as the “Dutch Nobel Prize”, is awarded annually to four Dutch researchers. Leerssen has been recognised for, among other things, his innovative contribution to imagology and to Irish Studies and his outstanding research on cultural nationalism.
Leerssen has an impressive list of publications to his name, focusing on national stereotypes and the relationship between literature, historical awareness and nationalism. His recent books, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (2006) and Imagology (2007), have permanently established his reputation.
In its jury report, the NWO notes that Leerssen has played an important role in three disciplines. In the area of Irish studies – the study of Irish cultural history on the basis of Ireland’s various cultural traditions and languages – his books are considered to be seminal. He has also unified two existing paradigms in the study of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism: one that views the nation as a latently present metaphysical entity and the other that sees it as a product of political manipulation. In doing so he has demonstrated that national movements should be studied largely on the basis of their cultural ideals and self-images and not just their political actions and the consequences of those actions. Finally, he has consolidated the field of imagology – the study of the formation of images, national awareness and stereotypes.
His research into the formation of images and national stereotypes has led to a new perspective on the history of cultural nationalism. In his research, he has adopted a comparative European approach that studies networks from the Balkans to the Basque Country and Finland. He is currently working on a major project that draws on this model to describe the nineteenth-century reception history of medieval literature in relation to concurrent nation-forming processes in Europe.
Leerssen is one of the founders and leading lights of the interdisciplinary field of European Studies, now a highly successful degree course and productive research programme at the University of Amsterdam. He has developed an impressive interdisciplinary methodology for this discipline, which combines the history of political ideas and cultural history and also studies literature as a source for the history of patterns of imagination and ideologies.
Joep Leerssen, born in 1955 in Leiden, studied Comparative Literature and English at RWTH Aachen University. In 1980 he obtained an MA in Anglo-Irish Studies from University College Dublin. From 1982 to 1984 he was a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto and from 1984 to 1986 assistant lecturer in Aachen, after which he gained his doctorate from Utrecht University in 1986. Since 1991 he has been Professor of Modern European Literature at the Faculty of Humanities at the UvA. From 1996 to 2006 he was also director of the Huizinga Institute, a Dutch national research institute and Graduate School of Cultural History. In 2003 he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 2009 he will be a visiting fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge.
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