De Vries - Van der Kooy Memorial Lecture

In 1996, the Dutch Studies Program was further enriched by the addition of the De Vries - Van der Kooy Memorial Lecture. Jan de Vries, a Dutch physician with the World Health Organization who taught at the University of Michigan, and Meindert van der Kooy, Director of Plant Operations at U of M, were instrumental in the formation of the Netherlands America University League in Ann Arbor. In honor of their extraordinary efforts to promote the study of the language and culture of the Low Countries, the annual De Vries - Van der Kooy Memorial Lecture has been held annually since 1996.

Previous speakers have included Richard Lauwaars, a member of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands (1996), the renowned poet and award-winning biologist Leo Vroman on the "common ground" between science and the arts (1997), the humanitarian and heroine of the Dutch Resistance Marion VanBinsbergen Pritchard, who saved more than an hundred Jewish children (1998), the great scholar of Dutch-Indies literature E. M. Beekman (1999), the physician and Dutch parliamentarian Corrie Hermann (2000), and Holocaust survivors Jaap Polak and Ina Soep (2001). E. M. Beekman's wonderful lecture on Rumphius and Dermout, "A Different Magic: What a Naturalist Taught a Novelist," has since been published in a beautiful format. We would love to be able to publish the lectures in this series regularly if we could find the necessary financial support.