As a lecturer in the Department of History and Art History and at University College Utrecht I teach BA and MA courses about the Middle Ages, historical methodology, and the treatment of the past in the past. I also work in Special Collections at the University Library, where I do research into our collection of medieval manuscript fragments. In my broader research I focus on two themes within the history of the Early Middle Ages: the legal culture of the Carolingian world and the wider food culture of Northwestern Europe before the year 1,000 CE.

I look at Carolingian legal culture from multiple angles. The dissertation I completed at Princeton University, titled Cupiditate Ducti: Corruption in the Carolingian World investigated both Carolingian conceptualizations of corruption and the consequences of attempts by both the center and the perifery of the Carolingian world to act on these conceptualizations to address and ban corruption. I am currently turning the dissertation into a book with the help of a fellowship from the Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors at the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. Alongside this, I am developing a new project on ideas about legal (in)equality and social justice in the post-Roman world. A small taste of this project will be published in Geschiedenis Magazine in the near future, as well as a first extensive study which will appear in the edited volume Living in a Carolingian World (Leiden: Brill, 2025)

For my research into the food culture of early medieval Northwestern Europe, I predominantly study recipes from various lists and other unexpected contexts in early medieval manuscripts. There are quite a few misconceptions about early medieval food --that early medieval people predominantly ate meat and drink beer, for instance, and that nothing culinarily exciting was taking place in their kitchens or on their dining room tables. The recipes I study show a much more complex and flavorful foodscape, where ideas about health and food cross paths in multiple different ways.

I am also a member of the Impact Council on behalf of the Medieval History chair and as such help think about our impact policies and our connections with societal partners.