Teaching staff

  • Dr Pieter Huistra (Programme Coordinator)

    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 (Programme Coordinator)

    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 Jochen Hung

    Jochen Hung's research focuses on the relationship between media, culture and society in modern history. He has published on gender representations in interwar culture, German-Jewish publishing and national identity, and youth culture in the Weimar Republic. 

  • 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 Renée Vulto

    Renée Vulto is a musicologist and literary scholar, and has written a thesis on eighteenth-century Dutch revolutionary song culture. Her first monograph Politics of Feeling in Songs of the Dutch Revolutionary Period (1780-1815) will be published with Amsterdam University Press in 2023. As a lecturer in Cultural History, Renée is involved in teaching various courses in the BA and MA history tracks.

  • Dr Eva Schalbroeck

    Eva Schalbroeck is a historian of colonialism and missionary activity in Central-Africa. In her doctoral thesis,she used the 'Commission for the Protection of the Natives' in the Belgian Congo as a lens to examine Church-state relations and colonial humanitarian governance. She is also interested in the immaterial afterlife of the colonial and missionary past. 

  • 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.