Permanent lecturers and their specialisations

MA director and academic advisor:
Prof. Joep Leerssen

Joep Leerssen

Joep Leerssen is Professor of Modern European Literature at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He has been director of Huizinga-Instituut (the Dutch national research institute for Cultural History) since 1995, has served on the Literary Theory Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association, and has recently held the Erasmus Lecturership at Harvard University. Leerssen works on the theory and history of cross-cultural representations, on Irish literary history, and on the history of the humanities and of literary studies. He published extensively in all these fields, including monographs, edited volumes and articles in such journals as Poetics Today, Modern Language Review and Journal of the History of Ideas. He is founding editor of the Yearbook of European Studies.

Dr. Jelle Koopmans

Dr. Jelle Koopmans is Faculty Fellow at the Faculty of the Humanities. He specialises in French mediaeval and Renaissance literature and the history of scholarship in these fields. His main research interests are worldly drama from the outgoing Middle Ages, the poetry of François Villon and the mentalities of Huizinga's Autumn.

Prof. Ieme van der Poel

Prof. Ieme van der Poel holds the chair of French Literature at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Her main interests are 20th century French and Francophone literature, in particular the influence of French/Francophone intellectual traditions and of individual French/Francophone theorists on postcolonial theory. She is currently writing a critical and biographical study of Julia Kristeva and completing an anthology on André Gide and the Congo Railway (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2004). She is an associate member of the research group "Littératures francaises du 20ième siècle" (Paris IV Sorbonne) and a member of the editorial board of various international journals.