Joep Leerssen

Additionally he served from 1996 until 2006 as director of the Huizinga Institute (the Dutch national Research Institute for Cultural History), which co-ordinates PhD tuition and senior research initiatives in Cultural History with participants from all Dutch universities.

His training has been in Comparative Literature, English, and Anglo-Irish Studies. His work moves in four contiguous fields: Irish intercultural history, the theory of national stereotyping; the history of romantic nationalism in Europe; the history of the humanities. It has appeared in monographs, edited volumes, and as articles in journals such as the Journal of the History of Ideas, Poetics Today, the Modern Language Review, the Modern Language Quarterly and Nations and Nationalism. It has won awards and repeated grants from various funding authorities.

He is Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, and a member of various learned bodies and committees; he has served on various juries for academic awards and academic review boards; he has advised, or refereed for, various research funding bodies in different countries, including the Royal Irish Academy, the Austrian and the Finnish Academy of Sciences, the European Science Foundation and the British, Dutch, Flemish and Irish funding authorities or Research Councils) as well as various journals and publishers. In 2003 he was Erasmus Lecturer at Harvard University.

Founding editor, with Menno Spiering, of the Yearbook of European Studies (1988; as of vol. 16 entitled European Studies). Series editor, with Hugo Dyserinck, of Studia Imagologica. Member of the editorial board of Comparative Critical Studies and Dutch Crossing.