Jeroen Dewulf

Jeroen Dewulf is the Director of the Institute of European Studies and 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 Chair of the Faculty Advisory Board on Study Abroad. He currently also serves as interim director of UC Berkeley’s Global, International and Area Studies research cluster and is interim director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Portuguese Studies.

Since 2017, Dewulf is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium and, since 2020, he is member of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Society of Dutch Literature). 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. He is also 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 at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. He holds an MA 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 the University of São Paulo and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL London. 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).

For his scholarly service, he was distinguished, in 1999, with the Quality Seal for Innovating Initiatives in the Field of Foreign Language Education by the European Union and he was awarded by the Cultural Foundation of the Swiss UBS-Bank for his research on Swiss-German literature. 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 community of enslaved Africans on 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.

At IES, Dewulf also serves as Director of Austrian Studies, the BENELUX Program, the Center for German and European Studies, the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, and is interim director of the Center for Portuguese Studies.