A professorship in literary foreign Dutch studies usually means that both teaching and research are more generalised and broader in scope than in comparable chairs of domestic Dutch studies. The research spectrum of Oldenburg Dutch Studies thus covers an observation period that extends from the 12th century to the present day, although the focus is on the first half of the 20th century (Bordewijk, Nieuwe Zakelijkheid/New Objectivity, Avant-garde, Modernism). This is also reflected in the History of Dutch Literature (Metzler 2006) edited by Prof Dr Grüttemeier together with Prof Dr Maria Leuker-Pelties.

Since Ralf Grüttemeier 's academic appointment to the professorship of Dutch Literature in 1997, the analysis of small literatures, the conceptualisation of intentionality and the relationship between literature and law have emerged as the Institute's research focus in literary studies.

The central question to which most of Grüttemeier's research work can be traced back is aimed at clarifying why literary texts were interpreted in this way and not differently by certain readers at certain times. The focus is therefore on the social dimension of literary phenomena or the regularities in the way various actors deal with them, for example in literary criticism or in legal proceedings.

Three of the Institute's projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are linked to the research focus on small literatures. The first project, the provisional conclusion of which is the publication Literary Trials. Exceptio artis and Theories of Literature in Court (Bloomsbury 2016), edited by Grüttemeier, focusses on how jurisprudence in Belgium and South Africa deals with literary texts. The completed doctoral project by Ted Laros on Literary Trials in South Africa 1910-2010 and that by Katharina Hupe on literary trials in Belgium belong within this framework.

The second DFG-funded project analyses the Nieuwe Zakelijkheid as a positional strategy in the Dutch art field of the interwar period. In her doctoral project, Janka Wagner is analysing the function of the concept of Nieuwe Zakelijkheid in the 1920s and 1930s with regard to the power struggles in the various artistic disciplines, i.e. in literature, music and architecture.

The most recent DFG project (2021-2025) examined the literary concepts of the legal and political elites in the Netherlands in the 20th century, including references to literary figures in the fully digitised speeches of politicians in parliament and interviews with selected judges from the highest Dutch courts about their literary preferences. From the perspective of literary theory, the aim was to describe and conceptualise more precisely the relations between the literary field on the one hand and what Bourdieu calls the "field of power" on the other. The preliminary results were discussed from an international comparative perspective at an international expert conference in Oldenburg at the end of August 2024. The resulting anthology, which Lisa Libbrechts played a key role in producing, is expected to be published by Bloomsbury at the end of 2026 under the editorship of Lina Blank, Lotte van den Bosch and Ralf Grüttemeier."

The research projects on small literatures in Dutch Studies are being developed in close co-operation with Prof. Dr Gun-Britt Kohler (Institute of Slavic Studies), particularly against the background of the further development of the field theory developed by Bourdieu using the example of France. Kerstin Bohne's doctoral project, which analysed the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature from a comparative perspective with regard to Dutch-language literature, also fits into this context (successfully completed at the end of 2023). The same applies to Haimo Stiemer's doctoral thesis(Das Habitat der mondblauen Maus. Eine feldtheoretische Untersuchung der pragerdeutschen Literatur (1890-1938), Königshausen & Neumann 2020), which uses a systematic analysis of Prague literary criticism to examine the development of Prague German literature in the first three decades of the 20th century. His research thus covers the period in which literary production in the German-speaking world experienced a striking increase in importance.

The increasing importance of Dutch as a subject in schools in Lower Saxony has also led to greater attention being paid to didactic issues in the field of literary studies. Fabian Nattkämper's subject-didactic doctoral project is based on Bourdieu's field theory, in which the rules of the game and dominance relations in the school field with regard to the conflicts surrounding culture-related learning in Dutch lessons were reconstructed on the basis of a short history of Dutch as a school subject (successfully completed in April 2021).

The conceptualisation of intentionality at different historical points in time is another of Grüttemeier's research focuses. During a stay as a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2008/9, this problem was supplemented by the question of the literary function of concepts of intentionality from a field-theoretical perspective and translated into a short history of intentionality in Dutch(Auteursintentie. Een beknopte geschiedenis. Garant, 2011). The monograph Intention and Interpretation: A short history (De Gruyter, 2022) attempts to bring the preliminary work into a systematic context: It spans a historical arc from Greek antiquity to more recent concepts such as actual intentionalism, supplemented by interdisciplinary comparative perspectives regarding the role of intentionality in jurisprudence as well as reflections on the function of the intentionality debate in literary studies from a historical perspective.

Other members of the literary studies working group:

• Lina Blank
• Beatrix van Dam
• Jan Oosterholt

Prof Dr Esther Ruigendijk's research focuses on the question of "how do we humans acquire, process and produce language?". The main focus is on comparative and experimental research, whereby the comparison of Dutch and German takes centre stage, but other languages are regularly included (e.g. Hebrew, English, Russian). Methodologically, we work with pencil and paper tasks as well as with spontaneous speech analyses, but also with reaction time studies of various kinds (cross-modal lexical priming, cross-modal lexical interference, word monitoring). The Oldenburg Linguistics Department also has a state-of-the-art laboratory for experimental linguistics, in which EKP (Event Correlated Potentials) studies and eye tracking studies (eye movement measurements) can be carried out.

In a number of projects, Ruigendijk focuses on the production, processing and comprehension of pronouns (er, ihn, sich) and articles (die, der, das) in children and aphasics or in second language acquisition (including in co-operation with Prof. Dr Friedmann, Tel Aviv; Dr Schumacher, Mainz/Cologne; Prof. Dr Hamann, English Studies Oldenburg; Prof. Dr Hendriks, Groningen). In her doctoral project, Hendrikje Ziemann is investigating the processing of pronouns in Dutch by German second language learners using psycholinguistic methods such as reaction time studies and eye tracker studies.

Prof Dr Friedmann, Tel Aviv;

Dr Schumacher, Mainz/Cologne;

Prof. Dr Hamann, English Studies Oldenburg;

Prof. Dr Hendriks, Groningen,(officiele site rug-medewerkers);

Prof. Dr Schulz, Frankfurt;

Prof. Dr Kollmeier;

Dr T. Brand;

Prof. Dr Hentschel;(voor publikaties)

Patrick Zeller;

At the end of projects on first language acquisition, research is conducted into different domains of language. In her doctoral thesis, Sara Jonkers focussed on the acquisition of Dutch modal verbs, a domain where both linguistic and cognitive aspects of development come together. Atty Schouwenaars is researching the question of how morphosyntactic information (e.g. case marking, sentence positions) is used by children in language comprehension and language production

Other projects are more concerned with the comprehension and production of sentences with non-canonical word order, so-called object-first sentences, such as object-relative sentences or object questions. These questions are worked on jointly with Prof. Dr Friedmann and Prof. Dr Schulz, Frankfurt, and initially focus on first language acquisition and language acquisition in children with hearing impairments.

Ruigenidjk is also working on a larger DfG project entitled 'Speech perception and speech processing in acoustically adverse conditions from an AUdiolical and psychoLINguistic viewpoint' in co-operation with colleagues from medical physics (e.g. Prof. Dr Kollmeier, Dr T. Brand) (more information: www.aulin.uni-oldenburg.de/). Among other things, the AULIN project is investigating the influence of speaking speed on comprehension and intelligibility. Together with PhD student Angela Jochmann, she is researching the effects of speeding up and slowing down sentences with different syntactic complexity in people with normal hearing, people with hearing loss and people with aphasia.

She has been a Principal Investigator in the Hearing4all cluster of excellence since 2011 . Together with postdoctoral researcher Dr Rebecca Carroll, she is working on various projects to investigate which types of linguistic cues (e.g. prosodic or morphosyntactic information) are still available to the listener for speech processing and comprehension in different types of noise or hearing loss. The doctoral programme 'Signals and Cognition' deals with similar questions. PhD student Mari Chanturidze will investigate the extent to which children with a hearing impairment (children with a cochlear implant (CI) or with a hearing aid) are able to acquire prepositions. The question is how damage to auditory sensory processing in young children (from birth) influences the acquisition of prepositions. This question is addressed with an interdisciplinary approach (linguistics, development, neural processing).

Together with colleagues from Slavic linguistics (including Prof Dr Hentschel, Patrick Zeller), a research project has been launched to investigate the processes of code-switching and borrowing in contact languages with varying degrees of close relationship and structural affinity in Slavic and Germanic.

Linguistics staff:

• Dr Ankelien Schippers
• Dr Bénédicte Grandon
• Andreas Hiemstra
• Matthias Reiner