Joep Leerssen was born in Leiden in 1955 and studied in Aachen, Dublin and Toronto. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has widely published on the interaction between the history of political ideas and literary/cultural history. His initial research was on the history of Irish nationalism (Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael, 1986; Remembrance and Imagination; Parnell and his times, 2020) and on the theory of national (self-)stereotyping (Imagology, co-edited w. Manfred Beller, 2007). He has since then worked on a comparative history of cultural nationalism in 19th-century Europe (National Thought in Europe, 3rd ed. 2016, Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, 2018). For this work he received the Spinoza Prize (the premier Dutch scientific award, 2008) and the Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values (2020).