This can be achieved through in-depth research, but you can also choose for a long-term perspective, examining the shaping of canons and the history of knowledge and science. We aim to problematize traditional breakpoints, for instance between the Middle ages and Early Modern Times, or between religion and science, politics and emotions, economy and culture. Long-term research of cultural history also challenges us to develop and employ innovative digital research methods.
Our focus areas:
- Religion - ritual - world view
- Science - knowledge - education
- Emotions - senses - body
- Politics - biography - leadership
- Culture - economy - ecology
Methods:
- Long-term and comparative research
- Digital Humanities – text, sentiment & concept mining
- Reconstruction – historical smells, theater performances
- Cooperation with private & public partners
Teaching
Our teaching focuses primarily on the period between 1300 and 1850, but PhD candidates, bachelor’s and (research) master’s students can also approach us for teaching and supervision regarding culture, religion, power, knowledge, emotion, senses and digital methods in modern history.
Research projects
The group has been very successful in attracting research funding from (inter)national scientific organizations, as well as private and public foundations, institutes and companies. Current projects include:
- Erika Kuijpers lead with Judith Pollmann (Universiteit Leiden) the interdisciplinary project Chronicling novelty. New knowledge in the Netherlands, 1500-1850. This project investigates the circulation and evaluation of new knowledge, ideas and technologies among a non-specialist public of middle-class authors of chronicles in the Netherlands. The project develops computational methods to use them in large numbers and comparatively, so as to track and analyse the circulation, evaluation and acceptance of old and new ideas and information over time and spatially.
- George Harinck leads the NWO-researchsproject ‘Church and Slavery in the Dutch Empire: History, Theology and Heritage’, together with the Protestantse Theologische Universiteit and the University of Curaçao. This research examines the role in slavery (via VOC and WIC) of, in particular, the Reformed Church in the Republic and of Dutch churches in the nineteenth century, and its repercussions.
- Fred van Lieburg is, among many other affiliations in the international field of religious history, principal investigator of the Netherlands e-Science Center project Digital Dutch Religion Portal (1500-2000) (DigiDuRe). This endeavor connects big datasets of books (STCN, GGC), religious specialists (pastors, ministers, etc.) and academics (RAN) in a digital infrastructure for research into correlations between religious positions, scholarly education, and the public discourse in the Netherlands and its colonies
- Inger Leemans was PI of the Horizon2020 project Odeuropa: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research. This project develops sensory mining techniques for olfactory heritage. It resulted in two websites – Odeuropa Smell Explorer and Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage – and two toolkits: The Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit and Olfactory Heritage Toolkit. The research on olfactory heritage will continue in the NWO-project POEM: Poetics of Olfaction in Earlymodernity.
- In Embodied Emotions, Leemans and Kuijpers developed a computer model (HEEM) that, on the long term, can trace (bodily) emotional expressions in old Dutch texts (Escience). Other current Digital Humanities projects include: QuPiD2 (AAA Data Science) and Visualizing Uncertainty (EScience).