Eastbound

The Eastbound project focused on the international circulation of literature in Dutch. The project showed not only that Flanders and the Netherlands imported many literary works from abroad, but also that Dutch-language literature was an important export product. Eastbound zoomed in on the German-speaking regions between 1850 and 1990, but it also intended to investigate the Polish, Czech and Hungarian regions, whose inhabitants familiarised themselves with literature in Dutch through German translations or otherwise.

Eastbound comprised two subprojects. The first subproject was led by Theresia Feldmann (PhD student at KU Leuven), who researched the distribution and the reception of Dutch-language literature in the German-speaking regions. The second subproject was in the hands of Orsolya RĂ©thelyi (postdoctoral researcher at Huygens Insitute, Amsterdam), who investigated translations and adaptations of Dutch-language literature in the Polish, Czech and Hungarian-speaking regions, passed on through German translations or otherwise.

The Eastbound team also included the research assistants Kriszitina Gracza, MichaƂ Hynas, Victoria van Rijn, KlĂĄra Ć rejmovĂĄ, and Jasmin Streunding, and the members of the advisory committee, including Prof. Dr Jan Ceuppens (Brussels), Prof. Dr Ralf GrĂŒttemeier (Oldenburg), and Prof. Dr Jerzy Koch (PoznaƄ). The Eastbound project was closely connected to the Digital Library and Bibliography of Literature in Translation (DLBT), which has been developed at the University of Vienna under the guidance of Prof. Dr Herbert van Uffelen.

Eastbound kicked off in August 2016 and concluded in 2021. The project had been funded by the Reseach Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), as part of the Free Competition Humanities programme ‘Cooperation Netherlands-Flanders’.

Project leaders: Prof. Dr Elke Brems (KU Leuven) and Dr Ton van Kalmthout.

Publications