Liesbeth van de Grift is Professor International History and the Environment at Utrecht University, where she has been employed since 2015. Her present research focuses on the European consumer movement and its impact on ideas and practices of public participation in Europe in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The project, funded by NWO through a Vidi Grant, is part of a broader research agenda aimed at studying the role of interest groups in European governance (see Research for more information).

Before that, Van de Grift was an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Political History and German Language and Culture at Radboud University Nijmegen. Among other things, she served as director of studies of the BA programme German Language and Culture. Her previous research project 'Brave New Worlds: Internal Colonization in Europe, 1918-1940', funded by NWO through a Veni Grant, focused on land reclamation and rural resettlement schemes as a way to study practices of social engineering in diverse ideological contexts.

From 2005 to 2012, Van de Grift worked at Utrecht University as a PhD and postdoctoral researcher. She wrote a dissertation on the post-1945 transition to communism in Soviet-occupied Europe, which led to the publication of Securing the Communist State: The Reconstruction of Coercive Institutions in the Soviet Zone of Germany and Romania, 1944-1948 in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. She translated this work into Dutch: Voorwaarts en vergeten. De overgang van fascisme naar communisme in Oost-Europa, 1944-1948 (Amsterdam: Ambo Anthos, 2010).

Liesbeth van de Grift studied Modern History at the University of Amsterdam and the Free University Berlin. She graduated cum laude in 2003 with a master’s thesis on the fall of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. After that, she worked as project manager at the Alfred Mozer Foundation (now Foundation Max van der Stoel) and the European Forum for Democracy and Solidarity, international foundations aimed at contributing to the development of democracy in (then) Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Liesbeth van de Grift was a visiting scholar twice. In 2010 she was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and in Spring 2017, she was a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.