9th Biennial Conference
Low Countries, Big Cities
3 - 5 April 2012
University of Sheffield

For the first time in human history, more people live in an urban environment than in a rural one. Cities are big and getting bigger. Cities have played a crucial role in the history of the Low Countries as places of encounter, exchange, protest and revolution. The city is a place of contrast: new trends emerge in a setting infused with history. Cities are often either celebrated as liberal, free spirited, worldly hybrids, or dismissed as locations of tension, lacking in morals and traditional values. Cities are places of linguistic innovation: new linguistic features emerge, indeed new urban vernaculars, of which Polder Dutch is a prominent example in the Low Countries. In art, representations of cities—and their related concerns—constitute some the most potent and thought-provoking images produced in the modern era.

It is the aim of this three-day conference to explore the cities of the Low Countries along and across cultural, linguistic and historical lines.

The keynote speakers will be Prof.dr. Herman Pleij (UvA), Prof. Wim Vandenbussche (VUB) and Prof. Geert BUelens (UU).

 

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