On Wednesday 31 August, Pieter Jan Kleiweg de Zwaan, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgium, and Professor Vincent Blondel, Rector of the Université catholique de Louvain, signed an agreement establishing an Embassy Chair named 'Desiderius Erasmus Chair: Dutch Across Borders'. Guest professor for the academic year 2022-2023 is Lotte Jensen, professor of Dutch literature and cultural history at Radboud University in Nijmegen.
Across borders
The chair is intended to promote exchanges in the fields of Dutch language and culture, society and literature. 'Such a chair shows the importance of Dutch across borders: Dutch is spoken in many places in the world. Dutch Language and Literature is an international field of study and Dutch culture appeals to a broad public across borders', says Lotte Jensen. 'To me, holding this chair means a lot: I advocate the promotion and preservation of Dutch as a language of education and research in different contexts. I feel at home in the environment of international lowland studies, perhaps precisely because Dutch is not my mother tongue, but Danish. Building bridges across borders fits my profile and I consider it an honour to be given this opportunity.'
Lotte Jensen is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and chairperson of the Modern Age Working Group. She is currently working on research into disasters and Dutch identity formation with an NWO Vici grant and on the Heritages of Hunger project with an NWA grant. She is a reviewer for de Volkskrant and a columnist for De lage landen.
Opening lecture
The opening lecture of the chair will take place on 18 October 2022 and will be about The Dutch struggle against water. National and international resilience. In the course of March 2023, Lotte Jensen will give a number of lectures to students as part of the 'Dutch Week'.