To kickstart our new series on American Studies on the continent, we travelled to Middelburg in the Netherlands to hear all about the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, a centre for research and collaboration established in 1986. Since 2003, RIAS’ PhD seminars have brought the best and brightest of American Studies scholars from across the globe to the Netherlands to showcase and discuss their research. Today, we heard about our guests’ experiences of this unique program, learned how to get funding, marvelled at RIAS’s archival collections, and reflected on both the challenges and advantages of working, researching, and conferencing in continental Europe.
We were joined by Aija Oksman (University of Edinburgh) to discuss all this with Gaetano di Tommaso, one of the program’s coordinators and a post-doc at RIAS, and David Carlson and Heleen Blommers, PhD students at the University of Notre Dame and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam respectively. Thank you to all involved.
To find out more about RIAS’s seminars, please visit: https://www.roosevelt.nl/activities/seminars/
If you host or have participated in a European initiative in American Studies, we’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch at usso@baas.ac.uk.
