Main Areas of Interest

• Global history
• Colonial History (Dutch Empire)
• Caribbean History
• Atlantic History
• Slavery and Abolition
• Alien Legislation & Concepts of Belonging
• Sex and Gender History
• History of Morality
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Research Project

Ambiguity and Disambiguation of Belonging - The Regulation of Alienness in the Caribbean during the Revolutionary Era (1780-1820s)

My current research project (2022-2025) takes the island of Curaçao as a case study to examine developments in alien legislation and notions of belonging in the Atlantic world at the tumultuous turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century. Taking an intersectional approach, the project studies how factors such as religion, national origin, enslavement, race, and class in questions of status, identity, and belonging on an island that was itself going through rapid changes in government, demographic makeup, and imperial affiliation.

Dissertation

Regulating Relations: Controlling Sex and Marriage in the Early Modern Dutch Empire

Leiden University, 2017-2022

Supervised by Prof. Cátia Antunes and Dr. Karwan Fatah-Black

My PhD project studied the early modern Dutch empire at a global scale, while zooming in on conflicts around intimate aspects of daily life, from marriage and divorce to sex, sexual violence, and illegitimate children. I explored how colonial administrators, communal and religious authorities, and individuals of various walks of life, through legal and extra-legal struggles around sex and family life, negotiated their place within deeply hierarchical but ever-changing colonial societies, along dividing lines such as gender, ethnicity, and legal status.

Selected publications

• (With Elisabeth Heijmans) (2020)  From impropriety to betrayal: policing non-marital sex in the Early Modern Dutch empire, Journal of Social History 55(2): 315-344.
• (2020) Authorities’ responses to violence against enslaved Africans: comparisons between eighteenth-century Curaçao and Berbice, Basiton: Working Papers on Slavery and its Afterlives 1(2): 15-19.
• (With A. Steensel A. et al.) (2020), Belgische en Nederlandse stadsgeschiedenis in historische tijdschriften (2018-2019), Stadsgeschiedenis 15: 54-79.
• (2020), Review of: Hage, R. (2019) Eer tegen eer. Een cultuurhistorische studie van schaking tijdens de Republiek, 1580-1795, BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 135(2): 53.
• (2022) Review of: Marjoleine Kars, Bloed in de rivier. Het onbekende verhaal van de massale slavenopstand in een Nederlandse kolonie. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 137.
• (With Elisabeth Heijmans, as editors) (expected 2022) Diversity and Empires: Negotiating Plurality in European Imperial Projects from Early Modernity (Routledge, forthcoming).