LUC BRILL-NIJHOFF WRITING INSTITUTE
Brill Publishers
Ever since its beginnings in 1683, Brill has been based in Leiden, home of the oldest university of the Netherlands. Founded during the golden age of Dutch history and culture, Brill has had a rich publishing history, including the publication of Bayle’s influential Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, the inception of one of the first scholarly journals in Chinese studies T’oung Pao, the publication of the Nag Hammadi Codices for UNESCO and a wealth of major reference works in its areas of specialization. The international nature of Brill's publishing program is perhaps best exemplified by the Encyclopaedia of Islam, a work now into its 3rd edition and still founded on the principles of international scholarly collaboration and review.Whilst the company's original activities included running a composing room, print works and bookshop, nowadays only a flourishing publishing house remains. However, Brill has always been an important international publisher. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century authors, editors and correctors from the four corners of the world came to work for the company in Leiden. In the last fifty years, strong working contacts have been established with the world's most important centers of academic research.
Founded in September 2010, the LUC Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute is a unique partnership between the oldest publishing house in The Netherlands and LUC. The LUC Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute promotes excellence in close reading and writing in various genres, maintains a Writing Studio that in the near future will involve trained students, supports an exciting student-run journal, Darya, and organizes a series of events, including lectures by prominent figures in the literary world, a reading group, and a summer school.
The LUC Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute is coordinated by Dr. Corina Stan, Assistant Professor of Global Challenges: Literature. Coach House 2.1
Because LUC prides itself to be an international honors college, all classes are taught in English and therefore spoken and written fluency in this language is one of the admission requirements. In their first year, all students build on these skills by taking two Academic English courses (2,5 EC each), and then have the opportunity to pursue the improvement of their writing by taking a number of writing-designated courses.
In Academic English I, taught in the first semester, students familiarize themselves with the basic protocols of academic writing: close reading, summary and analysis, interpretation, critical engagement with the work of others, development of a compelling academic argument.
In Academic English II, they read and analyze a variety of sources (fictional, theoretical, philosophical,…) and focus on a writing project that they carry through different stages of elaboration. This second half of the course, entitled Politics of Friendship, also introduces students to the ethos of academic writing as a conversation among scholars, a conversation that is both carried in the respect of difference, and with an eye to making rigorous, eloquent, compelling arguments supported by solid evidence.
The writing-designation acknowledges the writing-intensive component of a number of courses taught by various faculty at LUC. Assignments in a seminar that carries this tag typically include writing in various genres (and often for different audiences), multiple drafts and revision of essays, as well as student-workshops and extensive feedback from the course instructor.
Writing resources are available to all LUC students and faculty via the Blackboard page of the Writing Institute, and in the small library of the Institute in the Coach House.
The LUC Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute is coordinated by Dr. Corina Stan, Assistant Professor of Global Challenges: Literature. Coach House 2.1
WRITING AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE LUC CURRICULUM
Because LUC prides itself to be an international honors college, all classes are taught in English and therefore spoken and written fluency in this language is one of the admission requirements. In their first year, all students build on these skills by taking two Academic English courses (2,5 EC each), and then have the opportunity to pursue the improvement of their writing by taking a number of writing-designated courses.
In Academic English I, taught in the first semester, students familiarize themselves with the basic protocols of academic writing: close reading, summary and analysis, interpretation, critical engagement with the work of others, development of a compelling academic argument.
In Academic English II, they read and analyze a variety of sources (fictional, theoretical, philosophical,…) and focus on a writing project that they carry through different stages of elaboration. This second half of the course, entitled Politics of Friendship, also introduces students to the ethos of academic writing as a conversation among scholars, a conversation that is both carried in the respect of difference, and with an eye to making rigorous, eloquent, compelling arguments supported by solid evidence.
The writing-designation acknowledges the writing-intensive component of a number of courses taught by various faculty at LUC. Assignments in a seminar that carries this tag typically include writing in various genres (and often for different audiences), multiple drafts and revision of essays, as well as student-workshops and extensive feedback from the course instructor.
Writing resources are available to all LUC students and faculty via the Blackboard page of the Writing Institute, and in the small library of the Institute in the Coach House.
OTHER WRITING INSTITUTE INITIATIVES
Writing Assistance
Writing – whether about philosophical problems, ecosystems, debates in historiography, or international conflicts – is a challenging business. We simply do not write the way we talk, we have to be mindful of what others before us have said, our views change under the influence of various arguments and types of evidence, and then there is rethinking, revising, rereading, rewriting… Acknowledging these challenges, the Writing Studio offers students assistance with their writing projects in any of the classes they take at LUC. Stop by during office hours (in the second semester, Mondays 18:00 – 20:00 and Fridays 9:30 – 11:30) or make an appointment.This academic year a number of students who are excellent writers will have the opportunity to acquire training in becoming writing coaches by taking Academic English II Politics of Friendship (taught in blocks 3 and 4, Thursdays, 16:15 – 18:15). In 2012-2013, the successful trainees will receive a stipend in exchange for their work with the Writing Studio.
Darya, the LUC student journal
Already in 2010, the first year at LUC, a number of ambitious students got together to discuss their ideas for a student-run journal, which would create a public forum for debate of the subjects central to their interests and LUC curriculum: global challenges such as peace, justice, sustainability. Plans were made, ideas discussed, utopias critiqued and amended, emails sent, articles collected.This academic year (2011-2012), the editors – Laura Pierik, Sanne Nusselder, Eline Severijnen, Nitin Sood – are back with renewed enthusiasm, and looking forward to the online publication of Darya, available here: http://darya-journal.org/
Reading group…A Missing People: From Banned Books to Murdered Writers(Start date: Spring 2012)
Health as literature… consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people to come, still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations. (Gilles Deleuze)
If you speak you die. If you remain silent you die. So speak and die…
(Tahar Djaout)
The Parliament of Writers, whose first two presidents were Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, was created in 1993, after more than a thousand writers had been persecuted, imprisoned or murdered in the first half of that year. Their initial joint statement says: “We have gone from the censorship of works to the persecution of authors, from censored texts to beheadings”; censorship “no longer targets political, religious or ideological opinions but instead the whole area of representation. A new crime haunts the night of orthodoxies: the crime of creating, of writing, of imagining. The crime of literature.”
In this reading group we will attempt to map the territories of “missing people” that Deleuze and Djaout allude to, from the banned characters in books, born from the imagination of writers and found scandalous, to the writers condemned on political or religious grounds.
Schedule Spring 2012
This spring we will meet every other Wednesday, beginning on week 3 of block 3, from 17:00 to 18:30h.
Reading list:
22.02 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
7.03 Bei Dao, The Waves (1979)
21.03 Film screening (participants’ choice: Madame Bovary, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, or other adaptation of a banned book)
Spring break
11.04 Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth (1979)
25.04 Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy (1985)
9.05 Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason (1993)
23.05 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning blog, (2003-2007)
Please email Dr. Corina Stan (corina@lucresearch.nl) if you are interested in participating.
Please visit the Reading Group page for more on this and other reading groups.
Summer school (August 2012)
Before the start of the next academic year, the LUC Brill-Nijhoff Writing Institute will hold its first summer school, in which students will have the opportunity to workshop work-in-progress, both creative writing projects and academic essays, perhaps with an eye to publication in a peer-reviewed journal or to get an early start on the capstone project.During these two weeks of writing, exploration, discussions, and intense reflection on the power of eloquent and inspiring writing, we will be joined by two guests: literature professor Frank Lentricchia and political scientist Cristina Corduneanu-Huci.
Students who are pursuing creative writing projects will have the opportunity to receive guidance from Literature Professor Frank Lentricchia (Duke University), literary critic and author of numerous fictional and autobiographical books: The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (1968), Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (1975), After the New Criticism (1980), Criticism and Social Change (1983), Ariel and the Police (1988), Critical Terms for Literary Study (1990), Introducing Don DeLillo (1991), New Essays on White Noise (1991), The Edge of Night (1994), Modernist Quartet (1994), Johnny Critelli and The Knifeman (1996), The Music of the Inferno (1999), Lucchesi and The Whale (2001), Close Reading: The Reader (2002), Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital (2002), Crimes of Art and Terror (2003), The Book of Ruth (2005), The Italian Actress (2011).
Cristina Corduneanu-Huci attended graduate school in Political Science at University of South Carolina and Duke University. Her research interests relate to politics in non-democracies, autocratic survival, and government transparency. In addition, she has written and published on social movements in autocracies, clientelism in developing countries, bureaucratic reform, as well as the politics of healthcare. While her main geographical area of interest is the Middle East and North Africa, her work also draws comparisons between this region and selected countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For her dissertation research, she conducted fieldwork in Turkey, Morocco, and Romania. Cristina’s work has appeared in Comparative Sociology, World Bank Policy Research Working Papers series, as well as in the edited volumes Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective and New Frontiers in Comparative Sociology published by Brill.
For the last two years, she has worked with the World Bank in Washington, DC, raising awareness about the use of political economy studies for evidence-based policymaking on the ground, through research and training programs. She has participated in various stages of research projects related to development on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uruguay, as well as in training programs for development stakeholders in Sudan and Ghana.
At the summer school, she will guide students working on capstone projects or revising essays related to “global challenges.”
The summer school is open to students from LUC, Leiden University and other higher education institutions from the Netherlands and abroad. A call for applications will be circulated in March 2012. For questions, email Dr. Corina Stan.
Cover of Lentricchia's 'Crimes of Art and Terror' (2003)
