Diederik Oostdijk is Professor of English and American Literature at VU University Amsterdam. He specializes in 19th and 20th century American literature and culture. His doctoral thesis is a literary-historic analysis of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse under the editorship of Karl Shapiro (1950-1955). His project Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II (2011) explores the trauma of a generation of forgotten war poets through the examination of their unpublished work. In a project that started as a fellowship with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), he is currently finishing a book on the cultural significance of the Netherlands Carillon in Arlington, Virginia. A gift by the Dutch to the United States in the 1950s in gratitude for their support during and after World War II, the Netherlands Carillon, is a virtually unknown monument that occupies an important place next to Arlington National Cemetery and the Iwo Jima. The project analyzes how and why the Netherlands Carillon was offered to the United States, and what the monument signifies about Dutch-American relations and the Cold War.
