Dutch literary studies

Ralf Grüttemeier (1961) has been Professor of Dutch Literature at the University of Oldenburg in School III - School of Linguistics and Cultural Studies since 1997; he served as Dean of this school from 2005 to 2007 and from 2019 to 2021. Since 2024, he has been Vice-President for Research and Transfer at the University of Oldenburg. He studied Dutch Studies, History and German Studies in Aachen, Cologne and Amsterdam, and was awarded a PhD in 1994 from the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the ‘Nieuwe Zakelijkheid’ movement in Dutch literature.

In 2008–09, he was a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Wassenaar. From 2003 to 2012, he served on the editorial board of the journal *Internationale Neerlandistiek* (as chief editor from 2009 to 2012) and was co-editor of *Spiegel der Letteren* from 2013 to 2022.

Together with Maria-Theresia Leuker, he edited *Niederländische Literaturgeschichte* (Metzler, 2006), and together with Gillis Dorleijn and Liesbeth Korthals, he edited *Altes The Autonomy of Literature* (Peeters, 2007) and *Authorship Revisited* (Peeters, 2010). His most recent monograph was *Intention and Interpretation. A Short History (De Gruyter, 2022). A key focus of his research is Dutch literature of the first half of the 20th century: in 2013, he edited the anthology *Neue Sachlichkeit and Avant-Garde* (Rodopi, 2013) together with Klaus Beekman and Ben Rebel, and led the DFG project‘Functions of the debate on Nieuwe Zakelijkheid in the Dutch interwar field from a field-theoretical perspective’(2016–2019), which resulted in a doctoral thesis and culminated in the edited volume *Neue Sachlichkeit im Kontrast – Deutschland und die Niederlande* (De Gruyter, 2021), edited together with Janka Wagner and Haimo Stiemer. Another focus of his research lies in the relationship between literature and law. Within this framework, he has, amongst other things, co-authored a study on literary trials in the Netherlands, *De wet van de letter* (Athenaeum, 2005), and from 2010 to 2015 he led a DFG project on‘The Treatment of Literary Texts by Jurisprudence in Belgium and South Africa’, which resulted in two doctoral theses and the edited volume *Literary Trials. Exceptio artis and conceptions of literature in court (Bloomsbury, 2016), as well as his most recent DFG project,‘Concepts of literature amongst the legal and political elites in the Netherlands in the 20th century’(2021–2025).