Research group Innovating Digital Editions
Specialisation 18th and 19th-century literature; women’s writing
Contact suzan.van.dijk@huygens.knaw.nl
+31 (0)20-2246810

Biography

Suzan van Dijk studied French and Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht and at the Université Paris-IV. While teaching in secondary school she carried out her PhD-research and defended her thesis 1988 at Nijmegen University: Traces de femmes: présence féminine dans le journalisme français du XVIIIe siècle.

Next to and after graduate and postgraduate teaching (UvA and UU), she continued her research in 18th- and 19th-century women’s writing and (transnational) reception, and published widely in this field. She took the initiative, some 15 years ago, for creating – around an on-line database New approaches to European Women’s Writing (NEWW) an international network. This was successively financed by NWO, SURF, COST, CLARIN, HERA, and is now a DARIAH Working Group entitled Women Writers in History (c. 90 members).

She has been a visiting researcher at Huygens ING since early 2008. She also was a guest professor (Marie Jahoda Chair for Gender Studies) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (2008), and is a Honorary member of the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia.

Her research is about:

  1. the production of (Dutch and French) female authors (18th and 19th centuries) and the reception of their work. Collaboration with fellow researchers from the Netherlands and abroad, went on since the late 1990s thanks to the conception and establishment of a collaborative database, recently developed into NEWW VRE (NEWW: New approaches to European Women Writers). Various research, digitization and international networking projects were financed by NWO and SURF. The international network thus created was further extended thanks to COST IS0901 Women Writers in History (2009-13), CLARIN-NL: COBWWWEB (2013-14) and HERA Travelling TexTs (2013-16). Since early 2017 the network is functioning as a DARIAH Working Group, also entitled Women Writers in History;
  2. Belle van Zuylen (Isabelle de Charrière): her persona, her work, her correspondence;
  3. on both levels experiments are going on about the ways in which crowdsourcing can be used and “citizen scientists” included as collaborators.

Research output in Pure