I am a historian and assistant professor at Utrecht University's Political History Section. Currently, I am writing a book on the long-term history of reparations (Reparations. A History; under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press). A research article presenting an early modern perspective on reparations will appear in Journal of Modern History in mid-2024. For a broader public I have written on this topic in magazines and newspapers such as De Groene Amsterdammer and NRC. 

My other books, The Citizenship Experiment (Brill, 2019) and Revolutionaire tijden (Revolutionary times; Ambo/Anthos 2020) dealt with the limits of citizenship and equality in the age of Atlantic revolutions (c. 1770-1800). Together with my colleagues Arthur Weststeijn and Anne-Isabelle Richard, I edited The Dutch Empire between Ideas and Practice (Palgrave, 2019).

In this volume as well is in others, I wrote about Dutch visions of empire during the Batavian Revolution, slavery in republican political thought and about the rhetoric of moderation during the age of revolutions.

I also wrote articles and chapters about Spinoza’s use of the example of the so-called ‘Hebrew Republic’ in the context of seventeenth-century arguments for religious toleration and about Carl Schmitt's use of Spinoza’s 'pantheistic' metaphysics in his conception of anti-liberal democracy. 

A future research project aims to deepen our understanding of the democratic thought of Asian and African anticolonial politicians and thinkers in the period 1910-1970.

I am the host and interviewer of the historical podcast Blik achteruit [‘rearview’] and write regularly for De Groene Amsterdammer (about revolts against slavery and the relevance of Madame de Staël), The Dutch Book Review (about human rights and citizen councils), and I co-organize the Global Intellectual History Seminar. 

I was educated at the Free University Amsterdam, Utrecht University and University of Cambridge. As a graduate student I spent a semester at a Heidelberg Universität, and as doctoral student I was a guest researcher at Princeton University, New Jersey. 

Keeping an old hobby going, I still like DJ-ing now and then.