I am Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures in English at Utrecht University. I am currently developing a project on the development of modern free speech culture, and am more broadly interested in the intersection of literature with public debate. I am co-editing a volume of the Edinburgh History of the Radical Press, 1780–1914 (with Owen Holland), and my monograph Slavery in the International Women’s Movement, 1832−1914: Memory Work and the Legacy of Abolitionism recently appeared with Cambridge University Press (Open Access: please check it out).

My postdoctoral research with the ERC project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe considered the “protest lexicon” of social movements, and explored how activist memory is shaped and transmitted through language. This interest in the nexus between language and cultural memory resulted in a co-edited volume (with Ann Rigney) Memory and the Language of Contention (Brill 2025, Open Access: please check it out) and a forthcoming volume Language and Memory: Interactions and Mediations (with Natalie Braber and Thomas Van de Putte, Bloomsbury 2025). My articles have appeared, among other places, in Memory Studies, Language and Communication, and Historica. 

I am part of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, the Memory Studies Association, the Slow Memory COST Action, and serve on the board of the European Society for Periodical Research. I am also part of the editorial boards of the Journal of European Periodical Studies and the Yearbook of Women's History.