Jaap van der Bent

Jaap van der Bent (1948) was Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where he taught American literature, with an emphasis on the Beat Generation and African-American writing, until his retirement in September 2013. He was co-editor of Beat Culture: the 1950s and Beyond (VU University Press, 1999) and contributed to, among other publications, The Beat Generation: Critical Essays (Peter Lang, 2002), Beat Culture:  Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact (ABC-CLIO, 2005), The Transnational Beat Generation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Out of the Shadows: Beat Women are Not Beaten Women (Portal, 2015) and The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (Routledge, 2018). He has published many articles on American literature and the Beats in Dutch, British, and American newspapers, periodicals, and magazines. His Dutch publications include introductory essays, accompanied by translations, on the work of Harry Mathews, Douglas Woolf, Jack Spicer and Michael McClure (on whom he also published in French). His most recent publications are a biography of the Dutch poet Louis Lehmann, De dichter die het niet wilde zijn (AFdH, 2021) and, as author and editor, Jack Kerouac op weg in Nederland en Vlaanderen (In de Knipscheer, 2022), a collection of writing on the reception of Kerouac’s work in The Netherlands and Flanders.