Publication

JLGC 01: Imagining Europe. Modern Perspectives, Perceptions and Representations

Even the briefest glance at history shows that perceptions and definitions of Europe usually go beyond the geographical demarcation of a continent and that Europe has always signified different things to different people in different places, inside Europe as well as outside.

Author: Jacqueline Hylkema, Linda Bleijenberg and Anna Dlabačová, eds.
Date: 01 February 2014
Links: Open Access download (PDF)

At present, ideas of Europe underlie many of the key debates and struggles that mark our times. What is at stake in these debates – implicitly but increasingly often also explicitly – is the question of what ‘Europe’ means. One conclusion can be safely drawn: insofar as Europe is a place, it is a place that one imagines.

The first issue of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference aims to explore some of these imaginings in a collection of six articles that all reflect the diversity of the Modern representation of Europe. Written by young scholars from all over the world, these articles span a range of different media, from literature, cinema and political discourse to cartoons, architecture and policies for cultural heritage, but all focus on three questions: how is Europe represented in specific cultural-historical discourses, how are these representations constructed and what impact did they have on their respective audiences?

The articles also complement each other in terms of their perspective on the concept of Europe: the first three consider Europe from the ' inside' whereas the final three reflect on the perception of Europe from outside the continent. However, all of them demonstrate just how problematic any notion of inside/outside is when it comes to Europe – whether the representation in question concerns migrant cinema, Latin American culture or Japanese literature.

Series editor and editorial board

Jacqueline Hylkema

Series editor Jacqueline Hylkema (LUCAS) combines her professional experience as an academic editor with considerable organizational skills and has a solid track record in setting up new and innovative projects. After initiating and co-organizing the first LUCAS Graduate Conference, she decided to create a new platform for the publication of the conference’s papers – the result of which is this journal. Her own PhD research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric, the arts, and deception (forgery in particular) in the period between 1600 and 1750. Hylkema specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Britain, France and the Netherlands in the early modern period, with a particular interest in rhetoric (textual as well as visual), iconography, philology, cultural criticism and the Republic of Letters.

Linda Bleijenberg

In addition to her share of the editing tasks, Linda Bleijenberg (LUCAS) has taken care of the journal’s layout, its website and the style sheet. Her affinity with graphic design dates from her days as a student of architecture, an artistic discipline she now studies from a scholarly perspective. Her PhD research focuses on the relationship between the concept of the primitive hut, as it emerged in the architectural theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and broader cultural phenomena such as primitivism and the eighteenth century fascination with the origins of man, civilization, and a variety of cultural practices.

Anna Dlabačová

From the very start of the editing process, Anna Dlabačová (LUCAS) has proven invaluable as the journal’s head of communication, keeping in touch with all its contributors. She is currently preparing a PhD dissertation on the Middle Dutch mystical manual Spieghel der volcomenheit [Mirror of Perfection] written by Hendrik Herp. She studies the relationship between fifteenth century religious reform, especially the Franciscan observance, and the production and distribution of religious literature, knowledge and ideas in the Low Countries. Dlabačová is an associate member of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network MITT – Mobility of Ideas and Transmission of Texts, which focuses on the medieval dynamics of intellectual life and literature in the Rhineland and the Low Countries. Within this framework she works on an edition of a Middle High German introduction to Herps Spieghel.

Corina Koolen

A specialist in digital publishing through her own research and teaching activities, Corina Koolen has brought her expertise in this field to the editorial board. She is currently working as a lecturer at the Book and Digital Media studies programme of Leiden University (until February 2013) and preparing a PhD dissertation at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. She is part of the special research area in Digital Humanities, where her focus lies with computational analysis of contemporary Dutch literature.

Han Lamers

Trained in classics and philology, Han Lamers (LUCAS) closely scrutinized every paper offered to the editorial board and played a major part in safeguarding its high standards. His own research interests cover the classical tradition in Europe from the late-Byzantine appropriation of ancient Hellas (the topic of his dissertation, which he will defend in the spring of 2013) to the use of classical Latin in fascist Italy (the subject of one of his current projects). His research thus involves questions of cultural ownership, self-representation, and intellectual history. As a member of the Leiden Department of Classics, he has taught classes on classical Latin, the Latin culture of Renaissance Italy, and the cultural history of textual criticism from antiquity to the modern age. He is currently working as a full-time researcher at LUCAS.

Daan Wesselman

Last but not least, Daan Wesselman was chiefly responsible for the journal's introduction. An all-round editor, he can rely on years of experience at Tilburg University’s English department, where he edited work in a variety of disciplines and taught courses in writing and editing academic texts. He recently completed his PhD in Literary Studies at LUCAS. His research interests include the representation of cities, postmodernity, and interdisciplinary methodologies for bringing together the humanities and urban studies. He is currently a lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Access

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was designed to be downloaded in its entirety and read either as an eBook or on screen, both preferable in double page view. You can access a PDF of the full journal via the first link in the overview below. It is also possible to download individual parts of the journal, which you can find listed following the link to the full PDF.

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Get it at Leiden Open Access: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/20485