Amsterdam has always been a locus of powerful imagining, and for centuries the city has been the subject of representation in literature, music, and the visual arts. Yet while artists and writers have long emphasised the city's reputation for permissiveness and tolerance, in recent years the international image of Amsterdam as the paradigm of an "open society" has been charged with new significance and urgency. Against the backdrop of the "war on terror", an increasingly polarised debate has taken place about multiculturalism and about new, global challenges to our Western models of capitalist democracy. In this context Amsterdam has emerged as a privileged site of representation which registers changes, instabilities, and contradictions in the contemporary self-image of the West. On the one hand, the city's small scale and friendly face continue to secure a special -- though often caricatured -- place for it in the iconography of liberal democracy, and images of Amsterdam as open and tolerant have been reinflected and reassessed. On the other hand, international media coverage of the murder of Theo van Gogh and other recent events has located Amsterdam at the forefront of transformations that are felt to be underway or imminent in European society at large, turning the city into the site of various imaginings of the future. In a variety of ways, the image of Amsterdam stimulates utopian, heterotopian, as well as dystopian scenarios and speculations. Writers, artists, and film makers use the image of Amsterdam as a vehicle for reflection on much wider social, political, and cultural concerns, and their literary, filmic, and artistic renderings allow us to explore contemporary ideas about global and international developments.

This conference aims to examine the popular, literary, cinematic, and artistic image of Amsterdam in the "age of globalisation". From internationally acclaimed novels by John Irving, Arnon Grunberg, and Ian McEwan to blockbusters like Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve; from historical fictions by Deborah Moggach and David Liss to sociological journalism like Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam; and from Albert Camus's classic novel La Chute to art films like Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching, the storehouse of international representations of Amsterdam is vast and diverse. But whether these representations focus on the city as the setting of experimental and alternative lifestyles, on its history as a cradle of early-modern and modern capitalism, or on the inter-cultural tensions (including a religiously motivated killing) which it has seen in recent years, Amsterdam has always triggered an intense and multifaceted response in the eyes of its international and Anglophone beholders. The conference welcomes papers that explore these issues from various theoretical, critical, analytical, and cultural perspectives.

Keynote speakers (confirmed):

• Jeroen Dewulf (University of California, Berkeley).
• Adrian Favell (UCLA and Aarhus University).
• Russell Shorto (John Adams Institute, Amsterdam).

Panel organisers include:

• Henriëtte Louwerse (University of Sheffield).
• Ieme van der Poel (University of Amsterdam).
• Magdalena Sabat (New York University).

The conference will be held in Amsterdam, November 19-21, 2009, and will be jointly hosted by the Department of English and the Institute of Culture and History (ICH), University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam University College. The main conference venue will be the Trippenhuis (address: Kloveniersburgwal 29).

Please address questions to Dr. Joyce Goggin (j.goggin@uva.nl) and Dr. Marco de Waard (marco.dewaard@uva.nl).