Cultural historian Dirk van Miert new director of Huygens ING
Dirk van Miert, Associate Professor of Early Modern Cultural History at Utrecht University, has been appointed the new director of the Huygens ING, an Academy research institute dedicated to the study of history and culture, effective 1 October. He succeeds Lex Heerma van Voss, who is retiring.
Dirk van Miert (1974) is head of the Cultural History group at Utrecht University. He studies the early modern history of universities and scholarship. He also supervises a major project funded by the European Research Council in which digital technologies are used to shed light on the Republic of Letters, the transnational community of scholars and scientists between 1500 and 1800. He will continue this ERC project at Utrecht University.
"I am very honoured to succeed Lex Heerma van Voss as director of this wonderful institute" van Miert responds. "It is a big responsibility, but I will be fortunate to work with fantastic scholars and inspiring colleagues. As someone who very much enjoys studying manuscript material, the Huygens ING's tradition of making sources accessible is very close to my heart. My previous experiences at Huygens ING in the field of digital humanities were an important stimulus for setting up my current ERC project. I'm really looking forward to helping shape the digital infrastructure for the humanities at the KNAW."
Academic background
After receiving his master’s degree in Latin Language & Culture, Van Miert gained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2004 for his history of the Amsterdam Athenaeum. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked at the prestigious Warburg Institute in London on an acclaimed critical edition of the correspondence of scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). His next postdoctoral fellowship took him to Huygens ING, where he wrote a monograph on the emancipation of biblical philology in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. He then worked at Utrecht University, lecturing on the history of the natural sciences and humanities and on the theory of history, among other topics.
An impassioned and creative new director
In appointing Dirk van Miert, Huygens ING is gaining an impassioned and creative interdisciplinary scholar as its director who will be able to connect the history of politics, literature and science.
In appointing Dirk van Miert, Huygens ING is gaining an impassioned and creative interdisciplinary scholar as its director who will be able to connect the history of politics, literature and science. He is well grounded in digital humanities but never loses sight of more traditional research methods. His expertise will prove very useful for Huygens ING’s long-term strategy of using big data, a sustainable digital infrastructure and digital technologies to better understand the interaction between cultures and identities in Dutch history.
About Huygens ING
Huygens ING is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Huygens ING pushes the boundaries of research on Dutch history and culture. It unlocks and analyses original sources with the most advanced digital technologies and studies them not only in their national but also in their international context. It publishes its research results online and ensures that they remain permanently available in the form of scholarly editions, datasets and source publications. The institute thus fulfils a fundamental role in creating and maintaining the national infrastructure for the humanities while actively contributing to reliable knowledge about Dutch history and culture.
Huygens ING is one of the three founding institutes of the Academy’s Humanities Cluster, in which it cooperates with the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and the Meertens Institute.