The PhD/RMA Council facilitates the communication between the Institute and its members, helps in the evaluation of courses, and provides valuable input into the content and setup of the Huizinga curriculum. At the beginning of the new calendar year, the members of the Council are happy to introduce themselves.
Alie Lassche is a PhD candidate in Dutch history at Leiden University. She studies the changing information landscape of early modern Dutch chroniclers, and how they engage with new information (1500-1850). She is interested in the development and use of innovative computational methods to analyse text. Alie has been a member of the Council for three years now, and is currently its coordinator.
Anna de Bruyn is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on fifteenth-century book illustrations, particularly on how illustration practices developed with the advent of printing. Within the Huizinga Institute she is a member of the Research Network Visual and Material Culture.
Eliza Spakman is finishing her Research MA in literary studies at the RUG, specialising in late eighteenth-century Anglo- Irish women’s writing, particularly that of Maria Edgeworth. In the Council she represents the Research Master students in particular and is particularly interested in matters concerning the curriculum. For example, she first suggested the idea for the course ‘Key Concepts in Cultural History’, for students like her who come from a different discipline, which is now a fixed part of the curriculum, excitedly.
Sanne Hermans studied History and Dutch at the Universities of Groningen and Amsterdam. She specialises in the early modern cultural history of the Low Countries. At the University of Antwerp, she is a PhD candidate in the ‘Back to the Future’ project of Dr. Jeroen Puttevils and researches future thinking in the past using merchant correspondences written around the Fall of Antwerp (1585).
Sherilyn Bouyer is a PhD student at Groningen University. Her research focuses on justice, peacebuilding, transitional justice and religious conflict in early modern France. Her current research is part of the research project ‘Building Peace: Transitional Justice in Early Modern France’, funded by the Dutch Research Council. The objective of her sub-project is to analyse the role of bipartisan courts in the peace-making process after the French Wars of Religion.
Tanne Bloks is currently following the two research masters Dutch Literature and Culture (NL&C) and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at Utrecht University. Her research interests focus on the history of light and colour theory, and on how we can literally shed light on our cultural history, by analysing cultural heritage (mainly books and paintings) with spectroscopic techniques. Within the Council one of her main objectives is to enhance the inclusivity and quality of online and hybrid education within the Institute.
Furthermore we said goodbye to our RMA-member Marie Keulen, who recently graduated from her master Colonial and Global History, and has started this month as a PhD candidate at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, on a project titled ‘Religious Lives: Colonial Governance, Missionaries, and Afro-Caribbean Religion in the Dutch Caribbean (1820-1900)’. We want to thank Marie for her work for the Council!
Are you interested in joining the Council? We will be looking for new members again in a few months, so keep an eye on the newsletter! For more information you can al