Uploaded June 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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.
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.


![Homeland as Nightmare
Published in early 2019, the intersectional essay collection Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum brought together fourteen contemporary German-language authors to present their individual perspectives on the concept of Heimat [homeland]. Critiquing the reappropriation of this word that carries deep-rooted associations with the language of National Socialism, and in particular, the renaming of the German Ministry of the Interior to include as Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, the collection struck a nerve with scholars and the general reading public. But the interventions of these essays resonate far beyond the confines of the German-language, providing new viewpoints on global conversations around communal belonging and participation, integration and diversity.
Now, nearly three years after its initial publication, as national borders have been tightening, creating obstacles for refugees, labor migrants, and tourists, in the face of visceral polarization and rising rightwing violence, this collection’s interventions are more relevant than ever. On the occasion of the online publication of the English translation, Your Homeland is Our Nightmare (2021), co-editors Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah will speak about the ongoing resonance of their project, as well as their own independent literary works.
Hengameh Yaghoobifarah is a journalist and author. They studied media culture and Scandinavian studies at the University of Freiburg and the University of Linköping. In 2021, they published their first novel entitled Ministerium der Träume, which was awarded the Franz-Tumler Literaturpreis. Yaghoobifarah is a prolific contributor to newspapers and magazines, including die tageszeitung and Missy Magazine.
Fatma Aydemir is a journalist and author. She studied German and American studies at the University of Frankfurt. Her first novel Ellbogen (2017) won the Franz Hessel Prize and the Klaus Michael Kühne Prize. Her second novel Dschinns is forthcoming from Hanser Verlag on February 14, 2022. As a columnist, she has worked for die tageszeitung and the music magazine Spex. She also created the bilingual web portal taz.gazete to combat the repression of the freedom of the press in Turkey.
Jon Cho-Polizzi is a freelance literary translator and educator. He received his PhD in German and Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley, as well as an MA in Translation Studies from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. His English-language translations of Max Czollek’s Desintegriert Euch! (2018) and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum (2021) are forthcoming in 2022.
Deniz Göktürk is Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. Homeland as Nightmare](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/smBVIZGlRJE/mqdefault.jpg)







