Faculty
Jeroen Dewulf
Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies; Professor of German literature; Director of the Institute of European Studies (jdewulf@berkeley.edu)
Jeroen Dewulf is Professor at the UC Berkeley Department of German & Dutch Studies. As the incumbent of the Queen Beatrix Chair, he is director of Berkeley’s Dutch Studies Program. He is also the director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies and Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Board on Study Abroad. He currently also serves as interim director of UC Berkeley’s Global, International and Area Studies research cluster. Since 2017, Dewulf is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. Dewulf graduated with a major in Germanic Philology and a minor in Portuguese Studies at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. He holds a PhD in German Literature from the University of Bern, in Switzerland.His research interests are as diverse as Dutch and Portuguese (post)colonial literature and history, transatlantic slave trade, Low Countries studies, Swiss literature and European politics in general. He publishes in five different languages (English, Dutch, German, Portuguese and French). In 2010, he was distinguished by the Hellman Family Faculty Fund as one of the “Best of Berkeley Researchers” and in 2012 he won 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 slave community on Manhattan. In 2015 and 2016, he was the recipient of the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize in New Netherland studies.
Thomas F. Shannon
Professor of Germanic Linguistics and Dutch Studies (tshannon@berkeley.edu)
Thomas F. Shannon, Professor of Germanic Linguistics, member of the Dutch Studies Program faculty, and former director of the UC exchange program in Germany, has been in our department since 1980. He holds Master’s degrees in German (SUNY Albany) and Theoretical Linguistics (Indiana) and a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics (Indiana).
Shannon has taught and conducted research in the Netherlands at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen on a Fulbright grant and researched at the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Active professionally, he serves on MLA Executive Committees, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, and the Dutch journal Nederlandse Taalkunde (Dutch Linguistics), and was formerly Vice President of the Society for Germanic Philology.
His areas of specialization are modern German and Dutch, particularly syntax and phonology, and he has published widely on a variety of topics, including naturalness, syllable structure, complementation and control, ergative phenomena, passivization, perfect auxiliary selection, and word order. He is particularly interested in functional and cognitive approaches, e.g. the affects of various semantic, pragmatic, and processing factors on syntactic phenomena. Working from actual texts, he is presently studying several word order phenomena in Dutch and German, especially the ordering of elements in the middle field as well as historical change in West Germanic, including Afrikaans, Low German, and Yiddish.
Professor Shannon is a faculty member of and Graduate Advisor for the Germanic Linguistics Specialization composed of six upper division and thirteen graduate level courses. As such the Specialization imbues the Humanities with a scientific component; thus priority to the carefully rotated linguistics courses is given for achieving the essential competence in Germanic Linguistics.
Lecturers
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.