Mineke Schipper

Mineke Schipper (née Wilhelmina Janneke Josepha de Leeuw; born 6 December 1938 in Polsbroek) is a Dutch author of non-fiction and fiction. As a scholar she is best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies.

Description of the author

Thanks to her critical global perspective, Schipper has given an important impulse to the field of intercultural literary studies. Making her views accessible to both academic and non-academic audiences, she lectures not only at universities and scientific institutes (Berkeley, Beijing, Pretoria. Stockholm), but also to audiences outside the academy, such as policy makers in The Hague or Brussels.

She has also addressed a thousand rural women in the Amsterdam RAI congress centre; Jewish women in a synagogue in Leiden; a Muslim audience in a mosque in Nairobi; Egyptian folklorists in Cairo; and Cultural Institutes from Curaçao to Cambodia.

Education

Mineke Schipper studied French and Philosophy at Amsterdam Free University and Literary Theory, followed by Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Utrecht. She started her career teaching French and African Literature at the Université Libre du Congo (between 1964 and 1972). She received her PhD in Amsterdam in 1973, writing the first thesis in the Netherlands on African literature) and dedicated herself to developing the field of intercultural literary studies. In 1988, she became the first Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies in the Netherlands, at the Free University of Amsterdam.