My current research has three principal strands: the street, the home, and laundry. They join other long-standing interests such as the history of food, women's work, and female entrepreneurship.

The first is the history of the street, which I have worked on in various collaborative partnerships and research projects since 2010. After finishing a book on food hawking (2016), I directed the 5-year VIDI project The Freedom of The Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Eurasia (1650-1800). With a team of postdocs and PhD students, we studied the role of urban change in the gendering of public spaces in four large cities: Amsterdam, Edo, Batavia and Berlin. Our results can be seen here. This resulted in a textbook on Early Modern Streets (2023), and I am now writing a book that tackles the problem that, despite its prominence in the literature on cities, has not yet been solved: Did women (really) disappear from the street as cities modernized? I show how women used the streets in various urban contexts and how their movements were both facilitated and curtailed by the urban fabric.

A second interest is the history of the home in its broadest sense. I am interested in the architectural, material and social context of the early modern home and how that shaped the lived experience, community formation, and issues of segregation. With Britta Schilling I have set up the network (T)Huis, funded by a Cultural Heritage and Arts Impact Network (CHAIN) grant from the UU Humanities Faculty. This network centres on the relationship between built heritage and social cohesion and facilitates collaboration between various societal partners including museums, heritage institutions, policy makers and urban planners. In 2025 I collaborated with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam on the At Home in the Seventeenth Century Exhibition.

A third main line of enquiry is laundry. I am interested in laundry as a work process, as a form of embodied knowledge and skill, as a social and spatial phenomenon and as a lens to study sustainability in the context of the home and the household. In collaboration with the UU Artlab I explore how textiles were cleaned through performative methods. This project is also part of the UU Fashion and Sustainability network that I co-founded with Katharine Frederick. In my inaugural lecture, which is available here, you can read more on my interest in laundry.