dr. Bettine Siertsema

Bettine Siertsema graduated cum laude in Dutch Language and Literature at the VU. After working as a clerk at the University Executive Board and a staff member of the Blaise Pascal Institute on science and religion, she earned her PhD in 2007 with a study of religious and ethical issues in Dutch autobiographical literature on the Nazi concentration camps. She was a fellow of the Summer Institute of the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University (Evanston, Il, USA) in 2008. Other fields of interest include theology, liturgy and Dutch poetry. She is a free-lance preacher, based at the Ekklesia Amsterdam (http://ekklesia-amsterdam.nl/home/ ). 

Siertsema’s research focuses on international Holocaust literature and on oral testimonies of the Holocaust. She published on Etty Hillesum, Abel Herzberg, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, David Grossman’s See under: Love, female perpetrators, Dutch literary representations of the Eichmann trial and Dutch poets like Martinus Nijhoff, Ida Gerhardt, Huub Oosterhuis and Lloyd Haft. Currently she works on the Holocaust perpetrator as a literary personage.

Siertsema teaches a class on Media Ethics for bachelor students in Journalism (in the Department of Language, Literature and Communication) and, together with Dr. D.G. Hondius, a class on The Holocaust: History and Memory for bachelor students in History.

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