Koen Hoogendoorn MA

PhD Candidate

University Profile URL: https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/KCHoogendoorn

Cohort/Start PhD: 2025-2026

Het nut van lokale geschiedenis als crisisvoorbereiding / What local history offers in times of crisis

Supervisors: Scott Douglas, Lotte Jensen, Marlot Kuiper

What local history offers in times of crisis, lies in how communities have lived with uncertainty before. This PhD project explores how past moments of disruption were experienced, remembered, and given form within local settings, and how these experiences continue to resonate in the present. Working in parallel across archives, oral histories, and neighbourhood fieldwork, the project approaches documents, memories, places, and practices as interconnected historical sources. Through research in Zuilen (Utrecht) and Borgerhout (Antwerp), local history is understood as a cultural process shaped under conditions of necessity and carried in stories, rituals, and everyday forms of cooperation. These neighbourhoods function as living labs where archival traces and oral histories enter into dialogue with contemporary concerns about coming crises through historically grounded encounters co-developed with residents. Grounded in historical craftsmanship and cultural-historical sensibility, the project invites a historical perspective on how meaning, order, and solidarity are repeatedly made when societies are tested.