Dr Henriette Louwerse

Senior Lecturer in Dutch

email : h.louwerse@sheffield.ac.uk

I was born in De Lier, a village near The Hague in the Netherlands. I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Groningen and moved to the UK in 1990, when I started working in the Department of Germanic Studies here in Sheffield as a Lector in Dutch. I soon realised that I had to broaden my focus to include Dutch literature and I wrote my PhD-thesis on the literary works of the contemporary Dutch author Hafid Bouazza. My monograph Homeless Entertainment was published in 2007.

I enjoy reaching beyond the academic community and I am involved in a European Culture project called citybooks, an extensive literary project that seeks to develop alternative, principally literary travel guides to European cities. The follow-up project, WordSurge, will run in September 2012 as part of the University's Festival of the Mind and involve students, local writers and amateur dramatics performing poetry in and around the city.

Research

My research interests lie in the area of migration and literature, issues of multiculturalism, and women´s writing in Dutch. I am currently working on a project investigating the ambivalent attitude towards the notion of community as expressed in contemporary Dutch literature. For this project I collaborate with Dr Liesbeth Minnaard from Leiden University.
At Sheffield I am involved in the SOMLAL Research Cluster Postcolonial and Migration Studies and the Centre for Dutch Studies. I am a founding editor for the Amsterdam University Press open access Journal of Dutch Literature.

List of Publications

Seminars, Lectures and Public Engagements

• Director of Studies in Dutch
• Year Abroad Coordinator for Dutch
• I teach the Advanced Language Modules GER321/322
• I teach literature and culture modules for Level 2 (GER228) and Level 3(GER314)
• I teach two Project Modules: GER233 Stories (and what they do to us) and GER325 Questions of (Dutch) Culture
• I contribute to the MA in English Literature in the Postcolonial track (GER601)
• Within the collaboration Virtual Dutch, I coordinate the Translation Project this year with the author Abdelkader Benali.

In 2008 I was awarded a Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

• I am the Chair of the Association for Low Countries Studies (ALCS). From 3-5 April 2012 I organised and hosted the ALCS Biennial Conference at Sheffield.
• I am an International Fellow at the department of Contemporary Dutch Literature at the University Utrecht in the Netherlands
• From December 2009 until April 2011 I presented two series of five cultural encounters on Cultural Parenthood and on Heroes for deBuren Flemish-Dutch House deBuren in Brussels
• I coordinate the annual Writer in Residence UK Scheme funded by Dutch Foundation for Literature

I am Sheffield University's local partner for citybooks, an extensive EU-funded European project coordinated by the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren. Sheffield is the only UK city involved in this multimedia project which aims to create an artists' view on the city of Sheffield. Thus far, five authors, a photographer, a video artist and a group of Second Year students in Germanic Studies have contributed their portrait of the Sheffield. The result is an alternative travel guide, a combination of fact, image and the imaginary. The full citybook of Sheffield as one of fifteen other remarkable cities of Europe can be experienced here.

There are various student activities associated with this project including Sheffield students writing and recording their view on Sheffield in a Student citybook: Beyond Sheffield Train Station. Sheffield students of Dutch have together with their colleagues at UCL, Cambridge and Nottingham translated a citybooks into English: Abdelkader Benali's Skopje citybook, Warrior on a Horse

For Sheffield University's Festival of the Mind, which will take place from 20-30 September 2012, I will coordinate the next phase of the citybooks Sheffield: wordSurge.