Arthur Weststeijn is assistant professor in political history at Utrecht University. He is specialized in the history of the Dutch Republic and its colonial empire, the history and contemporary politics of Italy, and the history of Spain and Latin-America.

He researches the intellectual history of power, focusing on the ideas that express and contest political authority. This research has two main themes:

• colonialism: what ideas have shaped the history of European colonialism and the resistance against it?

• republicanism: how has resistance to autocratic rule given rise to ideas of liberty, citizenship, and democracy?

His current research concerns the intellectual history of early-modern (Dutch) colonialism, the history of anticolonial thought, and the history of the idea democracy. With archeologists and classicists in Rome and Groningen, he investigates the connections between ancient and modern forms of settler colonialism. Recently he also participated in collective research projects on the history of slavery in the Dutch empire and the representation of republican statehood in Venice, Genoa, and the Dutch Republic. Earlier he published extensively on early modern republicanism, the political uses of classical heritage, and the making of modern Italy, including the monographs Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age (2012), Termini: Cornerstone of Modern Rome (with Frederick Whitling, 2017), and Het Italiaanse experiment (with Pepijn Corduwener, 2020). He has also published Dutch translations of modern Italian philosophy, including work of Antonio Gramsci and Mario Perniola.

Before coming to Utrecht, Arthur Weststeijn was director of historical studies at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. He has held research positions in Padua, Leiden, and Groningen, he was a visiting researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a fellow at the Huntington Library and the John Carter Brown Library. He obtained degrees in history and philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. 

Arthur Weststeijn frequently appears as expert commentator on Italian culture and politics in Dutch media. For a selection of his books and media appearances, see www.arthurweststeijn.com.