Dick van Lente, born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1952. Ph.D. from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Associate Professor in Cultural History of Modern Societies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Fellow (1 September 2006 – 30 June 2007)
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE REST OF CULTURE: THE NETHERLANDS, 1945 – 1980
I worked mainly on two projects: first a book to be published in Dutch, with the provisional title ‘Technological innovations and Dutch culture, 1945-1970’. This book analyses representations of new technologies such as nuclear energy, automation, television and space flight in political discourse, science and technology popularisation and popular literature, especially comics. At NIAS, I have worked on, and largely finished, the introduction and chapters on politics and popularization. Second, an edited volume in English, provisionally titled ‘The atom and the public: popular representations of the nuclear age in six countries, 1945-1962’. I brought together a team of four senior scholars (including myself) for this book and have written a provisional introduction as well as a long chapter on the Dutch case, to serve as an example for the book as a whole. These texts have been discussed intensively with the other authors and revised accordingly. The project was presented at two international conferences and the first articles have been published or will shortly be published.