New MOOC - Dutch Advanced

Four international Dutch scholars -- among whom ALCS Chair Christine Sas (UCL) -- have developed a new interactive course for advanced learners of Dutch. The MOOC is built around 12 talks by the Universiteit van Nederland and the Universiteit van Vlaanderen, and is freely available online!

Tutors of Dutch can offer this course as a self-study package (all exercises are self-correcting), or embed it into their language modules. Ready-made speaking and writing tasks are free to download for teachers on Mijn NVT (Taalunie).

Nederlands voor gevorderde anderstaligen was created by Sofie Royeaerd (Masaryk Universiteit, Brno), Truus De Wilde (Freie Unversität Berlin), Christine Sas (University College London) and Esther Ham (Indiana University Bloomington), with the support of the Nederlandse Taalunie.

Spring 2022 Taalunie Writer in Residence is Rashif El Kaoui!

ALCS Essay Prize & Research Grant Winners 2021

UNDERGRADUATE ESSAY PRIZE 2021

We are pleased to announce two Undergraduate Essay Prize winners this year: Anna Mihilic (UCL) and Megan Strutt (University of Sheffield).

In Language Attitudes in Wallonia towards English and Dutch, Anna Mihilic explores the symbolic value of Dutch and English among university students in the French-speaking part of Belgium.

Megan Strutt's essay, Emancipation, Power and Religion in Guus Kuijer's 'Het boek van alle dingen', looks at the representation of tensions between traditional and more modern family values in the Orthodox-Protestant family of the protagonist in Kuijer's famous youth novel.

POSTGRADUATE/EARLY CAREER PRIZE 2021

The winner of the Postgraduate/Early Career Prize is Irving Wolters (UCL). His essay, Genesis of the Canon of Dutch Literature: The Bibliotheca Neerlandica, explores how a Dutch government initiative in the 1950s and 60s can be considered as the start of active canon building through translation sixty years ahead of it's time.

ALCS RESEARCH GRANT 2021

The ALCS is pleased to award a Research Grant to Davide Martino (Cambridge University). His research project, Hydraulic philosophy in three early modern cities (work title), looks at the uses and perceptions of water in the early modern cities of Augsburg, Florence, and Amsterdam.

The next deadline for ALCS Grants is 15 December 2021. Applications can be sent to our Treasurer, Dr Jenny Watson: jenny.watson@ed.ac.uk.

Our 3rd ALCS Postgraduate Colloquium 'City Lights' took place on 8-9 July 2021. This year's edition was curated by Adam Sammut (Univesrity of York) and brought together young scholars from all over the world to explore urban space and civic identity in the Low Countries.

The programme featured pannels on sense and the city, the early modern book trade, the built environment, urban politics and modern times. It also included a virtual 'show and tell' event showcasing the Dutch collections in the Short Title Catalogue and the British Library. Keynote speaker was Elisabeth de Bièvre, author of Dutch Art and Urban Cultures, 1200-1700 (Yale University Press, 2015).

ALCS Grant Winner Elise Watson Reports on her research trip to Antwerp...

In 2019, history scholar Elise Watson (University of St Andrews) was awarded an ALCS Research Grant to visit several archives in Antwerp to consult 17th-century documents concerning the trade in catholic books between the Northern and Southern Netherlands.

Dutch at Sheffield and UCL Dutch, together with Queen's College Oxford’s Translation Exchange and the Stephen Spender Trust, developed a new outreach project for Dutch in Primary and Secondary Schools.

Guided by their teachers and professional literary translators, students of Dutch at UCL and at the University of Sheffield have developed creative translation workshops for schools to demonstrate that even engaging with an unknown language can unlock your creativity and make you aware of your existing language skills. The interactive project wants to show young people that studying languages and cultures in higher education is rewarding and fun.

Over a few sessions, students were trained to become Creative Translation Ambassadors to deliver their own workshops in local schools and online. The results are a few ready-to-go padlet workshops that any teacher can work with, irrespective of whether they know Dutch or not. The workshop materials comprise of instructions and material for the workshop leader, worksheets for the participants and useful short videos about for example being a professional translator, how to pronounce typical Dutch sounds or why study languages...

In February and March 202, students of Dutch at Sheffeld and UCL welcomed Surinamese-Dutch author Tessa Leuwsha. Together with literary translator Jonathan Reeder, they worked on an English translation of extracts from Leuwsha's novel Plantage Wildlust (2020).

Plantage Wildlust tells the tale of a young Dutch couple that travel to Suriname to run a coffee plantation. The tension in the novel is palpable as the individuals struggle to rise above the role that history and society have assigned for them.

The translation was published on the prestigious cultural website the-low-countries.com. Sheffield student Megan Strutt wrote an introduction to the text, while another student, Elinor Sheridan, published a blog (in Dutch) about the project on the website of the Internationale Vereniging voor Neerlandistiek. Cherry on the cake was a full page devoted to Leuwsha, her novel and the translation project in De Ware Tijd, Suriname's national newspaper.

The Literary Translation Project is funded by the Nederlandse Taalunie and the Dutch Foundation for Literature.