Diederik Oostdijk (1972) is professor of English and American Literature at the Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He graduated cum laude for his Master's degrees in American Studies (1994) and English Language and Literature (1995) at Radboud University Nijmegen, after being an exchange student at Boston College for a year. After graduating, he pursued his Ph.D. on the editorship of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the same university, which he completed in 2000. He received a Fulbright grant to conduct archival research at several American libraries and institutions, principally the University of Chicago.
After teaching courses on American Studies at both Radboud University and the University of Iowa, he became assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit in 2001, teaching courses mostly on 19th, 20th, and 21st-century literature as well as on art and film. He specializes in 20th-century American poetry, war literature, and the memory of war in different art forms. This resulted in him co-organizing two conference on the reception of war, in 2004 and 2009, and authoring a monograph published by the University of South Carolina Press, Among the Nightmare Fighters, on how American poets responded to the Second World War.
Most recently, he published two books on the Netherlands Carillon in Arlington, a gift the Netherlands gave to the people of the United States to thank them for helping to liberate the Netherlands during World War II and for the Marshall Aid. Bells for America was published by Penn State University Press in 2019, and a lavishly illustrated Dutch version titled Klokken voor Amerika was published by Boom in 2020. A bilingual exhibit based on this story is mounted at Museum Klok & Peel in Asten, the Netherlands, which runs until May 2021. A television documentary on the history of Netherlands Carillon for the television programme Andere Tijden, with Professor Oostdijk as narrator, will be aired in October 2020.
