American studies has been an established field of study in Dutch academe since after World War II, when programs arose to combine studies of American history, literature, and culture. In Utrecht, Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Leiden, and Groningen in the twenty-first century, full-fledged, comprehensive American studies programs have attracted a growing number of students, at both the bachelor's and master's levels.

The Netherlands is home to the Roosevelt Study Center (RSC), an independent research institute on modern American history and European-American relations that has the reputation of pushing boldly into areas on the cutting edge of Dutch inquiry into the United States. The institute recognizes the Dutch connection of presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, whose ancestor Claes Martensen van Rosenvelt emigrated to the New World in 1649. The RSC is affiliated with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and is the home of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA), founded in 1977. The RSC is also a founding member of the American Studies Network, an organization of the twenty most prominent American Studies Centers in Europe. The RSC regularly hosts conferences where scholars from both sides of the Atlantic meet. The eclectic holdings of archival source material at the RSC attract researchers from many countries.

In addition to organizing a number of conferences and seminars for its members, NASA has hosted every spring since 1992 a one-day national conference as part of Amerikanistendag, or "America Day," to feature the research of undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in American studies. These are hosted in rotation by one of the five American studies programs at the universities mentioned above. The 2013 conference at Nijmegin, for example, was devoted to "American Crossroads: Transnational American Studies." The conference two years earlier at Leiden was on "American Memory/American Forgetting." In April 2014, NASA hosted the sixtieth anniversary conference of the European Association of American Studies in The Hague. The theme was "America: Justice, Conflict, War." The conference offered thirty workshops on a wide range of topics with a total of two hundred speakers, six parallel lectures, and six "shop talks."

Dutch academic interest in American culture, history, and literature emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, when American popular culture spread rapidly across the whole of Western Europe. Pushed by interdisciplinarily minded professors, comprehensive American studies programs gradually lodged in Dutch academic curricula. American literature and American history tend to be the core elements of the five degree-granting programs. All programs deal with the main social, economic, and political issues in American history, and pay ample attention to the way they are reflected and commented on in American culture. Most programs have an interdisciplinary character, combining history, social sciences, and literary studies in their methods and style, rather than primarily deriving from either the historical or the literary discipline.

The University of Amsterdam was the first university in the Netherlands to include American subjects and topics as a separate field of study, when "American Studies" was added to the chair of sociology professor A. (Arie) N.J. Den Hollander in 1947. The Den Hollander tradition of focusing as strongly on images of America as on America proper remained visible in the American studies program for years. In turn, his successor, Rob Kroes, brought a strong comparative perspective on the United States . The American studies program in Amsterdam is offered as a specialized track within the bachelor's degree program in history, as a minor, and as a full master's program. Ruud Janssens, who has led the program in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is strongly interested in American self-perceptions and how they play a role in world affairs.

Leiden University is also a leading center of research in American studies, and it has an international faculty and student body. Starting in 1963, Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt represented Leiden's stake in combining American history and culture into a comprehensive program of study. He was succeeded by Alfons Lammers in 1983. Leiden's chair in American history�until recently the only permanent chair in American history in the Netherlands�is held by British historian Adam Fairclough, who specializes in the civil rights movement. The Leiden program distinguishes itself from the other programs by a focus on the history and culture of ethnic minorities, in particular African American history and literature. In Leiden the American studies program is not an independent bachelor's program, but constitutes a specialization in the curriculum of history (BA and MA) and English (BA and MA) and a minor. Since 2012 Leiden University has offered a comprehensive master's degree in North American studies.

American studies programs were initiated at both the Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Utrecht in 1987. In Nijmegen, Gerardus A.M. Janssens became the first Dutch professor to hold a chair in American literature. Janssens's successor, Hans Bak, worked to strengthen the interdisciplinary character and international comparative orientation of the Nijmegen program by strongly developing the political-economic dimension of the American studies curriculum. At the bachelor's (the first year is shared with English language and culture) and master's levels students opt to pursue either a "cultural" or a "political-economic" stream. The Nijmegen program has been characterized by its concentration on language skills and a high level of communication in American English. In Utrecht, the American studies program has been marked by its broad definition of culture and by its exploration of the distinctive qualities of American culture and history in their multiple manifestations. The English and history departments form the pillars of Utrecht's multidisciplinary program, while additional courses are furnished by the departments of art history, film studies, and women's studies. Both the minor and master's programs have an emphasis on a comparative and international cross-cultural approach.

The only self-contained bachelor's program in American studies in the Netherlands is offered at the University of Groningen. In 2006 the first full professorship in American studies in Groningen was granted to Wil Verhoeven, professor of American culture. Verhoeven chaired the American studies department that ran the equally popular bachelor's and master's programs. The curriculum and research at Groningen emphasize both "high culture" and "low culture." With its central theme of "The Dynamics of Cultural Change: Nationhood and National Identity in the United States," the program highlights the question of what constitutes America's common identity and what characterizes contemporary America. Approaching the idea of culture as "the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life," the master's program aims to offer students broad theoretical insights into the idea of culture in general.

In the Netherlands, American studies evolved from a postwar interdisciplinary experiment into a flourishing field of study with student enrollments higher than in departments of traditional disciplines. In Utrecht, for example, an undergraduate course on American history draws a relatively high enrollment of 120 students. Courses tend to be offered from the interdisciplinary perspective of history, literature, social science, and gender studies. In view of rapid changes in the ethnic and religious diversity of twenty-first-century Dutch society, the students' interest is often focused on the study of minorities. This has been the case for many Dutch universities, where American studies has been oriented toward questions of racial, ethnic, social, and regional diversity in addition to transnational connections.

Doeko Bosscher

Bosscher, Doeko, American Studies in the Netherlands, European Journal of American Studies 1 (2006): document 12.

Bosscher, Doeko, The Study of U.S. History in the Netherlands, in Teaching and Studying U.S. History in Europe: Past, Present and Future, ed. by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton (VU Univ. Press 2007), 175�93.

Kores, Rob, Americanistics in the Netherlands, American Studies International 25 (1987):56�65. Rydell, Robert W., Re-entry: NASA and the American Studies Orbit,� in Through the Cultural Looking Glass: American Studies in Transcultural Perspective, ed. by Hans Krabbendam and Jaap Verheul (VU Univ. Press 1999), 23�31.