Dr M.O. Oprel (Marieke)

Marieke Oprel is assistant professor of Political History at Radboud University. She works on European political and social history from the nineteenth century onwards, with a special interest in both the institutional as well as the popular experience of war and conflict, and the Second World War in particular. This translates to a focus on issues such as restorative justice, expropriation and confiscation of enemy property and Jewish assets. Core themes in her research are citizenship as mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, state- and nationhood, policy-making and governance in times of (post-) conflict and crisis, transitional justice and human rights.

Dr. Oprel has published on the classification and categorization of German nationals and Jewish German refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 2020, she successfully defended her dissertation called ‘The Burden of Nationality. Dutch citizenship policies towards German nationals in the aftermath of the Second World War’, a project which was funded by NWO (Dutch Research Council). Her dissertation was published as a monograph by VU University Press.

Recent publications include contributions to the volumes Narratives of War (Routledge, 2019), Information and Power in History (Routledge, 2020) and a special issue of the European Review of History on property rights in wartime (2021). In 2021, she has published a Dutch-language monograph for a larger audience, called ‘Afrekenen met de vijand’. In 2022, a volume on the Dutch political party PPR, which Dr. Oprel co-edited, will appear.