Douwe Fokkema#

Douwe Wessel Fokkema was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1931. He studied Dutch Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam and Modern Chinese in Leiden. In 1963-64 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship and prepared the manuscript of his dissertation at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and at Columbia University, New York. He received his Ph.D. degree at Leiden University in 1965. In 1966-68 he was Chargé d'Affaires a.i. of the Netherlands diplomatic mission in Beijing, P.R.China.

Upon his return to the Netherlands he joined Utrecht University, from 1971 as Associate Professor, from 1981 to 1996 as Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.

He taught at Harvard (Spring semester 1983) and was invited to teach for shorter periods at Göttingen (1987), Princeton (1988), Peking University (1993), University of Alberta, Edmonton (1995), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (1998), University of Wroclaw, Poland (1998), Sichuan University, Chengdu (2007), and other universities. He was President of the Netherlands Association of Comparative and General Literature (1975-81), and Secretary (1973-79) and President (1985-88) of the International Comparative Literature Association. In 1988 he was nominated Honorary President of the ICLA.

Other functions: Director of the Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University (1987-94), Chair of the research programme 'Dutch Culture in a European Context' of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (1990-2004), Chair of the Board of the Netherlands Graduate School for Literary Studies (1995-96).

He received the Festschrift The Search for a New Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World (1996, edited by Harald Hendrix, Joost Kloek, Sophie Levie, and Will van Peer).