Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the UC Berkeley Department of German and a Professor at Berkeley’s Folklore Program(link is external). He is also the Faculty Academic Director of Berkeley Study Abroad(link is external) and is chair of the UCEAP Faculty Directors group. Dewulf also serves as a member of the UC Berkeley International Activities Coordination Group and represents the UC Berkeley Dean of Extended Education at the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). Dewulf is also the director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies,(link is external) where he is the chair of the Center for Portuguese Studies (link is external)and the Austrian Studies Program(link is external)
As an affiliated member of the Center for African Studies(link is external) and the Center for Latin American Studies(link is external), he is also active in the fields of African Studies and Latin American Studies. Dewulf is associated with the University of Lisbon as a researcher at its Center of History and also serves as the literary executor of the Swiss author Hugo Loetscher(link is external) (1929-2009). Dewulf graduated with a major in Germanic Philology and a minor in Portuguese Studies from the University of Ghent, in Belgium. He holds an MA from the University of Porto, in Portugal, and a PhD in German Literature from the University of Bern, in Switzerland. He has been a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, the Catholic University of Leuven, and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL London.
His main areas of research are Dutch and Portuguese colonial and postcolonial history, literature, religion, and culture, the transatlantic slave trade, and Black cultural, folkloric and religious traditions in the Americas. He publishes in five different languages (English, Dutch, German, Portuguese and French). For his scholarly service, he was distinguished, in 1999, with the Quality Seal for Innovating Initiatives in the Field of Foreign Language Education by the European Union and he was awarded by the Cultural Foundation of the Swiss UBS-Bank for his research on Swiss-German literature. In 2010, he was distinguished by the Hellman Family Faculty Fund and in 2012 he won the Robert O. Collins Award in African Studies as well as the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award. In 2014, he was distinguished with the Hendricks Award of the New Netherland Institute(link is external) for his research on the early Dutch history of New York and the first community of enslaved Africans on Manhattan. In 2015, his research on Black performance traditions in Louisiana was distinguished with the Louisiana History President’s Memorial Award(link is external) and both in 2015 and 2016, he was the recipient of the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize(link is external) in New Netherland studies. In 2019, his monograph on the Mardi Gras Indians received the Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award(link is external) and he was distinguished by the Luso-American Foundation for his contributions to the field of Portuguese Studies. In 2023, his book Afro-Atlantic Catholics was awarded the John Gilmary Shea Prize
Altantic Studies, with a focus on history, foklore, culture, religion, literature, and language; The transatlantic slave trade; Dutch and Portuguese colonial history; Dutch and Flemish literature, history, and culture; German literature, with a focus on Switzerland.