Academic staff

  • Dr Renée Vulto (Programme Coordinator)

    Renée Vulto is Assistant Professor of Cultural History with a focus on intangible cultural heritage. Her teaching covers topics such as media history, intangible heritage, (post)colonial cultures, and the sources and methods of cultural history. In her research, Renée is interested in the role of sound (from silence to noise) in the past, particularly in conflict situations. In her research, she draws on perspectives and methods from fields such as the history of emotions, sensory history, sound studies and the digital humanities to analyse a wide range of sources (texts, music, objects and practices). 

  • Dr Jochen Hung (Programme Coordinator)

    Jochen Hung is Associate Professor of Cultural History. the Master's programme. His research focuses on the relationship between media, culture and society in modern history. 

  • Dr Pieter Huistra

    Pieter Huistra is Assistant Professor Theory of History at the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University. His research covers the history of science in its broadest meaning, ranging from the humanities to the biomedical and natural sciences.

  • Dr Marijke Huisman

    Marijke Huisman is assistant professor in Public History, Education and Civic Engagement. She teaches on public history and the education of
    history, heritage and citizenship at the Department of History and Art History and the Graduate School of Teaching.

  • Dr Willemijn Ruberg

    Willemijn Ruberg has been lecturing in cultural history at Utrecht University since August 2009. Her research interests include: autobiographical writing, gender, sexuality, childhood, emotions and the body in the 18th and 19th centuries, and cultural theory. Her current research project addresses Dutch forensic medicine, the body, and expertise in 1800–1920.

  • Dr Pim Huijnen

    Pim Huijnen works as an assistant professor in Digital Cultural History at the Department of History and Art History. His research focuses on the use of digital text analysis to investigate the history of science and the history of ideas. He is, in particular, interested in conceptual history and the circulation of knowledge between the scientific, political and commercial domains and popular culture.

  • Dr Gertjan Plets

    Gertjan Plets is a cultural anthropologist specialised in cultural memory and heritage politics. His published work specifically looks at how the Putin government employs heritage as a political tool in manipulating both domestic and geopolitical landscapes. He currently coordinates a Marie-Curie funded project investigating the 'digital turn’ in contemporary heritage governance.

  • Dr Julie Deschepper

    Dr Julie Deschepper is Assistant Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies in the Cultural History section of Utrecht University. Trained as a historian of Russia and in the broad field of heritage studies, her individual and collaborative research projects are driven by the desire to critically explore the political uses of the past and its materiality, especially through architecture, monuments, and objects within a global context, and with a focus on (post-)socialist countries.

  • Dr Mette Bruinsma

    Mette Bruinsma is Assistant Professor in Cultural History. Her interests are history of science (19th and 20th century); university history, history of academic education, student life/experience; connections between history of knowledge and human geography: exchange, production and consumption of knowledge; methodological and epistemological questions concerning (spatial) scale, space and place.

  • Dr Elwin Hofman

    Elwin Hofman is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Utrecht University. His research concerns the cultural and social history of Europe since the eighteenth century, with a special focus on crime, emotions, sexuality, selfhood and psychology. 

  • Dr Flora Roberts

    Flora Roberts is trained as a social historian of the Soviet Union. Her research focuses on southern Central Asia, and she is broadly interested in the entanglements of nature and culture in the modern period. 

  • Dr Britta Schilling

    Britta Schilling is Associate Professor at the History Department. Her research has focused on European colonialism, comparative studies of empire and postcolonial legacies. 

  • Dr Grace Leksana

    Grace Leksana is an Assistant Professor of Indonesian History in the History & Art History Department at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the history and memory of violence, place-based knowledge, and the cultural politics of food. Employing microhistory and oral history methods, she explores "voices from below" that are often marginalized in mainstream historiography. After obtaining her PhD from Leiden University, she published her monograph, Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia: Embedded Remembering (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).