I am Emeritus Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam. In addition I hold an Emeritus Professorship at Maastricht University.

A comparatist by formation, I study post-1800 cultural history mainly as a transnational circulation of ideas and mentalities; the emphasis is on literary and discursive sources, which I analyse in their rhetoric and poetics as well as historically. My research interests (more fully described under the menu’s “Research” tab) are:

• nationalism and the history of national movements
• the survival of 19th-century cultural nationalism as 20th-century banal nationalism and 21st-century ethnopopulism
• the rhetoric and history of cultural and national stereotyping and ethnic characterization (“imagology”)
• the history of border regions and cultural minorities, especially in the Low Countries
• the history of the humanities since 1800, especially philology
• digital humanities: the database-assisted capture, analysis and visualization of complex communicative networks, cultural practices and ideological diffusion patterns

A full CV can be found here.