About
Bram van Leuveren is an art historian of early modern France and the Low Countries. He/They is specialized in ephemeral arts and architecture, especially within the context of public rituals and celebrations like joyous entries, multi-media ballets, and staged naval battles from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Although often recycled to save money and preserve the memory of the occasion for which they were created, ephemeral arts and architecture were crafted for a limited number of festive or ritual events, usually involving the entire court or civic society, from the artistic elite to ordinary artisans. Ephemeral arts and architecture ranged from wooden arches, stucco gateways and sugar palaces to painted cloth banners, robotic giants propelled by water or fire, and papier-mâché sculptures of ancient mythological gods.

Bram’s recent open-access monograph on the topic, Early Modern Diplomacy and French Festival Culture in a European Context, 1572-1615 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023) won an Honorable Mention in the 2024 category of the Claire Sponsler Award from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. The award committee especially applauded ‘the breathtaking research and breadth of the interdisciplinary expertise accomplished by Van Leuveren [in the book]’. Early Modern Diplomacy and French Festival Culture is a substantially reworked version of Bram’s doctoral thesis which he/they completed at the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, in 2019.

Bram’s research is distinctly interdisciplinary, as well as transnational, in scope: it operates at the intersection of art and performance history, on the one hand, and diplomatic and political history on the other, while also studying the European entanglements of the production and reception of French-Netherlandish ephemeral art and architecture. His/Their research interests include audience participation, ritual and pageantry, diplomatic and cultural exchanges, gift-giving practices, gender relations, and the colonial context of the arts, both ephemeral and more permanent, visual and performing.

Bram’s research has been sponsored by the European Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, the University of St Andrews, and the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, among others. Bram has thus been appointed to various prestigious research positions, including Research Associate at the University of St Andrews (2019-2020), Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (European Research Council, 2021-2023) at Leiden University and Visiting Fellow at Marsh’s Library, Dublin (2019). He/They is moreover board member of the European Branch of the Society for Court Studies and coordinates the International Network for Early Modern Festival Study, which bring together art historians, court historians, and political historians from across the globe. Bram currently lectures on early modern art history within the Bachelor and Honours College programme of Utrecht University.
 
Research
Bram has developed an extensive track-record of international and peer-reviewed publications, many of which appeared in open access, about aspects of early modern French and Netherlandish art and performance history, including the diplomatic significance of early modern ephemeral arts; the use of rituals for Franco-Dutch diplomacy in the late sixteenth century; diplomatic and dynastic uses of commemorative pamphlets on rituals and festivities in early seventeenth-century France and the Low Countries; the colonial context of gastronomical pageants in the Dutch Republic; privacy and rituals at the early sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century French court; and the involvement of ambassadors, both men and women, in creating art and staging pageantry. Bram’s publications draw extensively on previously little-known or undiscovered manuscript sources held in art-historical collections at both regional and national archives across Europe in multiple languages, ranging from letters and diaries of artists and artisans to financial receipts and recipes of ephemeral arts and architecture. Besides French and Dutch, Bram studies early modern manuscript sources in varieties of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. 

Bram gave a twenty-minute talk about his/their research on artistic diplomacy in early modern France and the Low Countries as part of his/their hybrid conference Pageantry, Ritual, and Popular Media: Netherlandish Practices of Public Diplomacy in 16th- and 17th-Century Europe at Leiden University on 2 December 2022. You can watch a recording of Bram's talk here:

 
Bram is currently co-editing a book on the involvement of marginalised communities, such as women, colonial populations, and people with dwarfism, in early modern French festival culture. It is the first to study the essential but now oft-forgotten involvement of marginalized communities in the production and reception of early modern festivals, both on stage and behind the scenes. Marginalized Voices and Figures in French Festival Culture, 1500-1800 will appear with Brepols in 2025. Bram is moreover preparing a special journal issue for the peerreviewed open-access journal Early Modern Low Countries. It explores the understudied role of theatrical and ritual spectacle, and especially its use of ephemeral arts and architecture, in managing and broadcasting the international relations of the Low Countries, both within Europa and Asia, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Ephemeral Arts and Rituals: Netherlandish Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe and Asia is set to appear in April 2026.
 
Teaching 
Bram has a diverse and international teaching profile. Before joining the Art History department of Utrecht University in February 2024, Bram taught early modern art history, early modern general history, media, theatre, and performance studies, and comparative literature at the University of St Andrews (2019-2020), Groningen University (2020-2021) and Leiden University (2021-2023). Student evaluations have praised Bram’s personalized, accommodating, and well-supervised style of teaching, which is closely aligned with the Utrecht Educational Model. His/Their teaching is research-driven and allows students to practice (pro)actively with art-historical insights and methods in a stimulating and innovative way. Successful examples of this are creative assignments in which students learnt to implement different storytelling techniques in different art media and experiments at the ArtLab of the Art History department in Utrecht for which students partly recreated ephemeral art objects and scents.