Frank Bovenkerk

In 1975 he defended his Ph.D. dissertation in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam (promotor A.J.F.Köbben) on emigration and return migration from Suriname to The Netherlands. From 1974 on he worked at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University where he published the results of real life experiments that proved race discrimination in The Netherlands: Omdat zij anders zijn.

In 1983 he co-authored with Anne Eijken and Wiesje Bovenkerk-Terink a social history of Italian emigrants to Europe who specialized in making and selling Italian ice-cream. In 2004 this publication was published again but with contributions of Loes Ruland on the emigration of Italian chimney-sweepers and mosaic-workers. In 1995 he wrote La bella Bettien, a life history of a Dutch lady who had become big in the international trade in narcotics from Colombia. In 1999 a play movie was made out of this book.

In 2004/05 Prof. Bovenkerk was a member of the criminology commission headed by professor Fijnaut that investigated organized crime in The Netherlands for a fact-finding parliamentary commission on police methods. Together with Yücel Yesilgöz he published a book on the Turkish mafia in 1998 that was later issued in translated form in Greece and in Turkey. Frank Bovenkerk directed an extensive research program on multiculturalism in the administration of justice from 1999 until now. In 2003 his book on the illegal cultivation of cannabis in residential neighborhoods that he wrote together with Willemien Hogewind came out. In 2005 the results of a study that prof. Bovenkerk conducted together with the criminology section and the students of the first master course in criminology came out on the subject of threats against public officials in The Netherlands.