Select Papers from the XIXth Biennial Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies

Abstract

The following articles were originally presented at the 19th biennial Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies. Held in Bloomington at Indiana University in June 2018, the conference was organized by the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS). The four articles published here approach the conference theme of the Changing Low Lands from a variety of angles that corresponds with the assortment of topics and disciplines presented at Bloomington. Isabella Lores-Chavez underscores the diversity of the Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century and how Hendrick Avercamp’s charming winter scenes both reflect and actively shape this new identity. Sarah Dyer Magleby’s consideration of Adriaen van de Venne’s humorous image of ice-skating owls, taking on human characteristics, is of its seventeenth-century Dutch moment as it alludes to a series of proverbs and other visual culture to produce a multi-layered moral message. Derek Kane O’Leary’s paper takes us outside the geographical boundaries of the Low Countries in detailing the efforts of nineteenth-century New Yorkers to integrate the region’s Dutch history into the developing national narrative of the antebellum United States. Finally, Joshua Sander examines the National Socialist effort to shape expatriate Germans and Dutch citizens in the image of the Reich through the German Schools in the Netherlands in the 1930s and 1940s. Our two art historical papers together illustrate the variety of methodologies and potential readings in this discipline, with very different approaches to that celebrated Dutch sport of ice skating. With television host Katie Couric’s much-mocked 2018 explanation of why the Dutch Olympic team dominated in speed-skating (because frozen canals are a major mode of transport in the Netherlands, she argued), it’s clear the world associates ice skating with the Netherlands, but these papers show that ice skating is about more than sport in the Dutch Golden Age. Read as anthropology or allegory, the scholars consider the solidity of the ice, the placement of the skates, the costumes of the skaters, and the setting of the frozen surface, and provide context from the historical and cultural moment to elucidate this imagery and speak to Dutch seventeenth-century morals and identity. The two historical papers plunge into archival sources to investigate the ways in which educational institutions attempted to shape national identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though the antebellum New York Historical Society differed greatly from educational ministers who oversaw German International Schools in the Netherlands prior to and during Nazi rule, both saw education as a central component to the development of narratives of national unity. Where a succession of German education ministers attempted to mold the German Schools into a bulwark against ‘Dutchification,’ while constantly redefining what it meant to be German, the New York DUTCH CROSSING 2019, VOL. 43, NO. 3, 207–208 https://doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2019.1656792