With effect from 1 October, the cultural historian Inger Leemans (51) will become the interim director of the Academy’s Meertens Institute for the next six months. As head of NL-Lab she is already associated with the Academy’s Humanities Cluster. She is also professor of cultural history at VU University Amsterdam and a member of the Academy’s learned society. In her interim position, she is the successor to Antal van den Bosch, who was director of the Meertens Institute from 2017.
Inger Leemans began her career as a specialist in Dutch language and literature. She is a researcher who dares to make original choices, as regards both topics and methods. Her research deals with historical themes that intersect the individual, the cultural and the social, such as pornography and the radical enlightenment, emotions in an economic context (for example on the floor of the stock market), the historical attachment of the Dutch to kite flying, and the history of scents and odour. Prof. Leemans is a pioneer in the digital humanities and is passionate about the valorisation of knowledge. She gives lectures for a variety of audiences and regularly appears on radio and television and in podcasts.
Since 2019, she has been head of NL-Lab, in which the Meertens and Huygens Institutes collaborate on research into Dutch culture and identity, both past and present. NL-Lab pools expertise from a variety of knowledge fields and utilises innovative research methods – such as a combination of fieldwork, archival research, and historical reconstructions – to investigate how national identity is formed, felt, and transmitted. NL-Lab will soon be publishing a book on cheese as a national symbol. From NL-Lab, Prof. Leemans also directs the European Odeuropa research project, which deals with sensory mining and olfactory heritage.
Inger Leemans has this to say: “I’m truly delighted to take on this role. It is a great honour to be able to work even more closely with everyone within the Humanities Cluster, especially with colleagues at the Meertens Institute. I’m also looking forward to fruitful and enjoyable collaboration with the HuC's Committee of Directors.” Among other work in the next few months, Prof. Leemans will seek ways for the Humanities Cluster institutes to cooperate further in their research and organisation.
More about Inger Leemans: https://nl-lab.net/en/about-nl-lab/who-are-nl-lab/core-team/inger-leemans/
The Meertens Institute is an Academy research institute. It studies and documents the Dutch language and Dutch culture, focusing mainly in the phenomena that shape everyday life in our society. The institute’s collections are a key component of the Netherlands’ humanities research infrastructure.