Dutch Wednesday 27.02.2019 - Creative Designs in the Hermitage: interaction between knowledge, collection and presentation​

Marlies Kleiterp - Hermitage Amsterdam

Making an exhibition is a process that can take several years, and you are not doing it alone. With a permanent partner as a the State Hermitage Museum – with a treasury with more than three million works of art - the Hermitage Amsterdam has a unique position in the Netherlands. In her lecture, Marlies Kleiterp will talk about this unique cooperation, which is based on exchange of knowledge and mutual respect. A crash course: how to make an exhibition?

Marlies Kleiterp is Head of Exhibitions at the Hermitage Amsterdam and De Nieuwe Kerk. She studied Art History and Archaeology at the University of Leiden. After graduation, Kleiterp started at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, where she worked until 2005. Since then she fulfills her current position. She is also a board member of the International Committee of Exhibition Exchange (ICOM), a member at International Organisers Group (IEO), the Master's students selection committee for Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam and also a member of the advisory council of the Dutch Institute in St. Petersburg.

Dutch Wednesday, 28.03.18: Religion and Solidarity

Prof. Dr.  J.B.A.M. (Hans) Schilderman - Radboud Universiteit

What is the significance of religion for shaping the social lives of European citizens? Public life is said to privatize, pluralize and commercialize. Europeans live in welfare states and the market increasingly addresses their needs and concerns. The contribution of religions to the basic concerns of social life – so influential in many countries over the past centuries - has often been overhauled by the institutional provisions and public insurances for our care and wellbeing. Is there any room left for the social tasks of religions and the churches? Or does religion grow into a marginalized phenomenon: more a private concern in family life than a public effort to realize societal concerns? There are both normative and descriptive sides to these questions. The normative side concerns the issue what religions’ contribution to modern societies should be. What are the moral concerns that motivate their contributions? The descriptive side assumes simultaneously a preceding and subsequent question: does religion in fact represent a social force and if so, to what objectives does it successfully contribute? Answers to these normative and descriptive questions do not necessarily match.

Some of the intricacies of this issue I hope to clarify in this lecture at the Netherlands Institute in Saint Petersburg. After sketching some religious differences among European countries and their church-state dependencies, I will clarify the notion of solidarity from the idea of social capital. In doing so I hope to discuss religions’ opportunities and inevitable limitations in morally engaging in social issues.

Prof. Dr J.B.A.M. (Hans) Schilderman (1959) is professor ‘Religion and Care’, and key domain chairholder in Empirical and Practical Religion at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands. His teaching interests and research expertise cover a variety of topics ranging from spiritual care, ritual and ethics to cross-national research on social and political issues in religion. He has been engaged in the NORFACE funded research program on religion and solidarity (EURESOURCE) and has been president of the International Society of Empirical Research in Theology (ISERT). As supervisor of the master 'spiritual care' he publishes on professionalization issues in spiritual care, and is currently studying the religious significance of quality of life in suffering.

Dutch Wednesday, 11.09.17: Perception and Truth

Prof. Dr. I.E.C. Sommer, Universiteit Utrecht 

What we perceive and how we perceive it is the result from an intricate collaboration between our sense organs and our brain. Only small aspects of our surrounding are entered to conscious perception, with emphasis put on contrast, unexpected objects and movement. From there, we interpret these selected fragments on the basis of previously learned associations, using likelyhoods to guess the whole picture. What results is a strict subjective perception of the world, heavily biased towards expectations and previous experience. If we realize how subjective our world view really is, it helps overcome different views.

Iris Sommer is Professor Psychiatry at the University Utrecht and was elected a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Science (DJA of KNAW). She is an invited member of AcademiaNet, making her one of the 500 leading women in sciences and putting her on the same list with the organization's chair Angela Merkel.

Dutch Wednesday 16.11.2016: Drug Research in Leiden, from Foxglove to EPO  

Prof. dr. Adam Cohen, medical Center, Leiden University

Drug research in Leiden, from foxglove to EPO

Around the 1980's patients were admitted to hospital for minimally 6 weeks to cure their duodenal ulcers. We were taught at the time that this was a psychiatric disease. Today we know it is an infection and treatment is generally at home by the general practitioner with drugs rather than with operations. We can expect many similar spectacular developments for diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and cancer in the near future.

Dr. Adam Cohen, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Leiden and director of the Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR).

Dutch Wednesday, 10.02.2016: Small is Beautiful. The History of Political Thought in ‘Marginal’ Cultures

Prof. dr. M.K. Monika Baár, Modern and Contemporary History, Leiden University

Which are the universal attributes of political thought and which are the characteristics that differ across time and space? 

Dutch Wednesday, 27.01.2016: The Most Discussed Star

Peter Barthel, Professor of Astrophysics, Groningen University

The Star of Bethlehem: the history of its interpretation, ancient near-eastern astronomy, astrology and the Magi, astrology in the Greco-Roman and the Jewish worlds, the early Christian world and some modern points of view.

Dutch Wednesday, 02.12.15 Urban revolutions

Prof. dr. Jan Nijman, University of Amsterdam

This lecture singles out five such moments, or revolutions: the first cities of the neolithic age, the ancient republican city, the early modern bourgeois city, the industrial city, and the information city.

Dutch Wednesday, 28.10.15: 20 Years of International Climate Change Politics: what has been achieved, what has gone wrong and what might happen next

 Philipp Pattberg, Transnational Environmental Governance, VU University Amsterdam

In this lecture prof. Pattberg critically discusses more than 20 years of international climate change diplomacy including a new climate agreement which will be negotiated in December of this year in Paris.

Dutch Wednesday 7.10.2015: Democracy and economic development – a perspective from economic history

Prof. Jan Luiten van Zanden,  Utrecht University

Economic history is focused on the wealth and poverty of nations: why some parts of the world have achieved sustained economic growth and why did other parts of the world stay behind.  What is driving the ‘great divergence’ between nations?  To what extent do different institutions and cultures play a role? 

Dutch Wednesday, 06.05.2015: No Culture, No Europe

Pascal Gielen, Director of the Research Center Arts in Society, Groningen University

The central proposition of his last book ‘No Culture, No Europe. On the Foundations of Politics’ (2014): culture is the basic source to give meaning and form to societies. “We need to study culture as a sensemaking process” 

Dutch Wednesday, 1.04.2015: Water. A geophilosophical history 

René ten Bos, Professor of Philosophy and Organizational Theory, Radboud University

In his lecture the Dutch philosopher René ten Bos speaks about the philosophical tradition of the concept of water and our relation to water from a philosophical perspective. This indifference and hatred of water and, more specifically, the sea is part and parcel of the history of Western philosophy.  René ten Bos discusses this thalassophobia at length and also provides an explanation for the rather paradoxical fact that mankind in spite of this phobia and hatred actually did venture to sail the seven seas.

Dutch Wednesday, 11.03.15: Neighbourhood Transformation in the Netherlands: Ethnic Teahouses vs Hipster Coffee Bars

Prof. Jan Rath, University of Amsterdam

Jan Rath, professor of Urban Sociology at University of Amsterdam, has done research on a wide array of  topics including sociology, urban studies, politology, gentrification, immigrant entrepreneurship etc. He is particularly interested in the ways in which cities in a globalizing world help shape unity and diversity. His research focuses on how the urban opportunity structure  - notably its political, economic and symbolic dimensions - shapes life chances and social relations, and vice versa. 

Dutch Wednesday, 26.11.14: Expansion and Extinction: the Collapse of the Mammoth Steppe Fauna

Prof. dr. Thijs van Kolfschoten, Leiden University

A special Cleveringa lecture about the dynamic, fascinating process of expansion and contraction of the woolly mammoth. 

Dutch Wednesday, 29.10.14: What if computers could read the news?

Prof. dr. Piek Vossen, VU University Amsterdam

Prof. Dr. Piek Vossen develops computer programs that read massive streams of daily news to extract what happened, when and where, and who is involved: 'Now, we can start ask ourselves the question how much the world changed yesterday according to the news'.

19.09.2014: 'Cities in Transition: The Case Of Moscow'

Zef Hemel, professor on Urban and Regional Planning (Wibaut Chair) at the University of Amsterdam  

As a planning practitioner based in Amsterdam, Zef Hemel was involved in some major planning efforts in the Moscow region over the last years. In his lecture he shared his views on the future of Moscow, based on his theoretical thoughts of cities functioning as 'brains'.

Dutch Wednesday, 28.05.14: Religious Belief in the Age of Science

Herman Philipse, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Utrecht University

The core thesis of the lecture is the following: if you want to be an intellectually responsible atheist, you have to do more work than Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud ever imagined.

Dutch Wednesday, 16.05.14: Democracy. One size fits all?

Prof. dr. Evert van der Zweerde, Radboud University

Is there one 'type' of democracy that would – or even should - fit the whole world, irrespective of history, geography, or civilization, or should we differentiate and conclude that each people gets the regime it deserves?

Dutch Wednesday, 06.05.13: The scent of the sea - Ode to Emiliania

Prof. dr. Jos van den Broek, Leiden University 

The scent of the sea - Ode to Emiliania is an interactive visual lecture in which the origin of the odour of the sea is revealed. This lecture is initiated by Satellietgroep and The NIP in the context of the project 'Now Wakes The Sea'.  

Dutch Wednesday, 09.10.13: Participatory Archiving. Audiovisual Archives in the Digital Age

Prof. dr. Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam 

The proliferation of digital technologies has changed the way we perceive of and use audiovisual archives and their holdings. Unlimited online access and active user participation have become crucial for an archive’s visibility and public existence.

Dutch Wednesday, 05.06.13: Unexpected Applications of the Humanities

Prof. dr. Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam 

There is no need to be modest about the feats and deeds of the humanistic disciplines – it is only that humanists could sell them much better.

Dutch Wednesday, 12.09.13: The End of Tolerance? Religion and Politics in the Contemporary Netherlands

Prof. dr. James Kennedy, University of Amsterdam

If there is one word with which Dutch history is associated, it is its fabled tolerance, especially during it Golden Age. That seems to be in short supply now, with many Dutch actively questioning how good it actually is to practice forbearance toward those with unacceptable ideals.