We study the way in which people produce, circulate and reproduce culture

Who owns the past? That’s one of the most important questions on which we focus as cultural historians. We study the way in which people produce culture (through institutions, bodies and networks), circulate it (through education, books, newspapers, images and digital media), and reproduce it (through memory practices and heritage politics).

Cultural History is one of the most interdisciplinary groups at the History department: we are trained as historians, but also as archeologists, philologists, journalists and philosophers, even as physicists. Our group critically reflects on methods, taking a special interest in the Digital Humanities in research and didactics in secondary education. We focus on such themes as modernity, Europe, empire, gender, race, citizenship, the body, public history, history of science & humanities, and the theory and history of History as an academic discipline.

Education and Research

We run a Master’s programme about the Cultural History and Heritage and we play a role in various other (research) master programmes. Our research is clustered in three groups:

Collaboration

We run our own Heritage & Public History Lab. Within the Universty, we are embedded in the Strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies, we participate in the interfacultary Descartes Centre for the History of Knowledge, and we teach for the Graduate School of Teaching. We contribute to the Open Science Platform, the focus are Applied Data Science (i.c. Special Interest Group Text Mining), and at the Faculty level to the Centre for Digital Humanities. Some of us participate in the UGlobe Decolonisation Group. On the national level, we teach and carry out resesarch for the Huizinga Institute (the Netherlands Research School for Cultural History).

Areas of expertise: academic institutions | biography | body and gender | citizenship | cultural heritage | digital humanities | history of concepts and ideas | modernity | psychiatry | public history | history of knowledge | postcolonialism | visual culture