20-11-2020

Karina van Dalen-Oskam honorary professor at the University of Wolverhampton (UK)

Karina van Dalen-Oskam has been appointed Honorary Professor at the School of Humanities at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom with effect from 1 November. Together with professor Bas Groes she will lead the project “Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon“.

Monday, November 16 at the Being Human Festival – the largest festival for the humanities in the United Kingdom – Karina van Dalen-Oskam launched together with writer Kit de Waal and professor of English literature Bas Groes from the University of Wolverhampton, the research project “Novel Perceptions”. This British study from the University of Wolverhampton replicates the project ‘The Riddle of Literary Quality‘ that Van Dalen-Oskam led from 2012 to 2019. That project analysed how the literary quality of novels was assessed in the Netherlands.

Thanks to her appointment as honorary professor, Van Dalen-Oskam’s expertise will be firmly anchored in the team at the University of Wolverhampton. She looks forward to discovering what makes a novel literary in the perception of British readers: “I’m curious how this differs from what I’ve learned about Dutch readers, and how these differences can be explained.”

Opinions on four hundred English-language novels are collected in the online survey “the 2020 Reader Review”, which was also launched on November 16.

“Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon” earlier this year received £ 300,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the UK’s premier arts and humanities fund. For more information, see the English project page and the description on our website.