Michael Douma, who was a visiting research fellow at the A.C. Van Raalte Institute at Hope College this past summer, will present the address "Dutch Americans and the Rise of Heritage Studies" on Friday, Dec. 3, at 4 p.m. in the Fried/Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.

The public is invited.  Admission is free.

Douma, who is a 2004 Hope graduate, is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University, where his studies have focused on Dutch-American history.  His dissertation is focusing on the evolution of Dutch-American identities since 1847.

He is the author of multiple peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and book reviews, and of the book "Veneklasen Brick: a Family, a Company, and a Unique 19th Century Dutch Architectural Movement in Michigan," published in September 2005 by the Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. of Grand Rapids/Cambridge.  His work has received recognition and support, including a 2009-10 Fulbright Full Grant to conduct research in the Netherlands; two one-year fellowships, for 2009-10 and 2010-11, from the Institute for Humane Studies; and fellowships from Florida State University.

Originally from Grandville, Douma was a triple-major at Hope (history, philosophy and a composite in Dutch studies).  He began working in the college's Joint Archives of Holland during the spring semester of his freshman year, an experience that inspired his interest in Dutch-American studies. He spent his junior year studying in the Netherlands, building on a year of study in the Dutch language at Hope.

During the fall of 2004 he was a curatorial intern with the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.  He has stayed involved with Dutch-American studies at Hope, serving during multiple summers as a research assistant and Dutch-English translator with the A.C. Van Raalte Institute, which shares quarters with the Joint Archives in the college's Henri and Eleonore Theil Research Center.

He completed his master's degree in history at FloridaStateUniversity in 2006.

The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street.