Jeroen Dewulf
Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies; Professor in German Studies; Professor in Folklore (jdewulf@berkeley.edu)
Jeroen Dewulf is also the Faculty Academic Director of Berkeley Study Abroad and is chair of the UCEAP Faculty Directors group. In addition, Dewulf serves as a member of the UC Berkeley International Activities Coordination. He is also the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Portuguese Studies, Austrian Studies Program and BENELUX Program at Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies.
As an affiliated member of the Center for African Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies, he is also active in the fields of African Studies and Latin American Studies. Dewulf is associated with the University of Lisbon as a researcher at its Center of History and also serves as the literary executor of the Swiss author Hugo Loetscher (1929-2009). Dewulf graduated with a major in Germanic Philology and a minor in Portuguese Studies from the University of Ghent, in Belgium. He holds an MA in Portuguese Studies from the University of Porto, in Portugal, and a PhD in German Literature from the University of Bern, in Switzerland. He has been a visiting professor at LMU Munich, the University of São Paulo, the Catholic University of Leuven, and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL London.
His main areas of research are Dutch and Portuguese colonial and postcolonial history, literature, religion, and culture, the transatlantic slave trade, and Black cultural, folkloric and religious traditions in the Americas. He publishes in five different languages (English, Dutch, German, Portuguese and French). In 2010, he was distinguished by the Hellman Family Faculty Fund and in 2012 he received the Robert O. Collins Award in African Studies as well as the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award. In 2014, he was distinguished with the Hendricks Award of the New Netherland Institute for his research on the early Dutch history of New York and the first community of enslaved Africans in Manhattan. In 2015, his research on Black performance traditions in Louisiana was distinguished with the Louisiana History President’s Memorial Award and both in 2015 and 2016, he was the recipient of the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize in New Netherland studies. In 2019, his monograph on the Mardi Gras Indians received the Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award and he was distinguished by the Luso-American Foundation for his contributions to the field of Portuguese Studies. In 2023, his book Afro-Atlantic Catholics was awarded the John Gilmary Shea Prize
Bio/CV:
Research interests:
Atlantic Studies, with a focus on history, folklore, culture, religion, literature, and language; The transatlantic slave trade; Dutch and Portuguese colonial history, literature, and culture; German literature, with a focus on Switzerland.
Esmée van der Hoeven
Lecturer in Dutch Studies; Dutch language coordinator (ievanderhoeven@berkeley.edu)
Esmée van der Hoeven is Continuing Lecturer in the Dutch Studies Program at the Department of German. She has an MA degree in Language and Culture Studies from Utrecht University (2004), and received her certification in teaching Dutch as a Foreign Language from VU University Amsterdam (2006). She is experienced in teaching Dutch language courses on all levels and has a special focus on conversation practice and writing skills. At UC Berkeley, she is responsible for the Dutch Language Program. She is also Program Director in the Berkeley Summer Abroad Program to the Netherlands and Belgium. Before she came to Berkeley, she has taught Dutch language and culture at Utrecht University, Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, Delft University of Technology, and Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. For more information, visit her Professional Teaching site.