Dr D.R. de Boer (David)

David de Boer is an assistant professor of political history. He is broadly interested in how people in the past thought about moral obligation, created transnational solidarity networks, and managed migration in a globalizing world.

His first book, The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution (Oxford University Press, 2023) investigates the rise of the printing press as a weapon against state persecutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 2024, David received the D.J. Veegens Prize of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities for this work. He is currently developing a new research project on migration debates and the governance of human mobility between ca. 1650 and 1900. Comparing London, Amsterdam, and Berlin, he traces how migrants, diplomats, and political stakeholders universalized and transferred local migration narratives to manage human mobility. In doing so, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the stories that created our global migration debate.

David studied history at Utrecht University and received his PhD from the University of Konstanz and Leiden University (joint doctoral degree). He held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the Leibniz Institute of European History, and the European University Institute. Before joining Radboud University, he was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.