Research projects
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Displaced Forgetting. Sri Lankan Migrants in the Cape Colony
How did enslaved people from Sri Lanka become 'local' in the multi-ethnic Cape Colony? This project analyses their life courses and those of their descendants, and examines why their slave ancestries gradually disappeared from the colonial archive.
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Trust in the Balance? Interpersonal Credit at the Cape
How did trust and social networks shape economic growth in colonial Cape Town, and how did credit work as a social system? This project reveals how people used personal relationships to access opportunities, resolve disputes, and navigate inequality.
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In God we Trust? Unmarried Women in the Cape Colony
How did unmarried women build support networks in the church-shaped society of 18th-century Cape Town? This project shows how women (free, manumitted, and enslaved) helped secure trust, care, and social recognition for themselves and their children.
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Trusting Witnesses? Legal Credibility in the Cape Colony
Colonial courtrooms were more than places where justice was administered by high officials. In the 18th-century Cape Colony residents engaged there every day with each other and with the authorities to discuss who they were and what they wanted.
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Lenses on reading culture (Lenzen op leescultuur)
The research project Lenses on reading culture (Lenzen op leescultuur) examines the reading culture and reading policies of forty-five secondary schools in the Netherlands over a four-year period, focusing on different aspects of the reading policy.
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Tuning into Tensions: Music and Affective Polarisation in Protest Movements
This project investigates the role of music in polarisation processes by examining how it is used in protest movements on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
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<MsPhys>
The MsPhys-project uses AI to investigate how medieval manuscripts disseminated knowledge and culture through their form and content, with the Physiologus tradition as the key to understanding textual evolution and heritage.
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CONSENT
CONSENT examines the theme of sexual consent in medieval European narrative songtexts (c. 1300-1550).
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Investigating Insemination Fraud
This project investigates how this insemination fraud and other (from today’s perspective) malpractices in fertility treatments were possible in the Netherlands between 1945 and 2004.
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Parliamentary History Series: Politics during the Lubbers cabinets (1982-1994)
In 2023, the CPG began a new research project on politics in the long 1980s and during the Lubbers cabinets (1982-1994) that will result in a new volume (volume 11) of the Parliamentary History Series.
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Economies of Trust?
Who could be trusted in a deeply unequal, cosmopolitan society? This project looks beyond colonial paper realities to reconstruct bottom-up social networks in the 18th-century Cape Colony and how these were performed vis-a-vis formal institutions.
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Anchoring religious change through local place-making
This project investigates how local communities in the Roman Empire integrated new religion in the existing urban space imbued with pre-Christian monuments and meaning.
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A Democratic Turn?
This project examines how the democratization of French society during the Third Republic (1870-1940) influenced references to Graeco-Roman antiquity in daily newspapers.
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From India to Indenture
This PhD research will examine the life courses of Indian indentured labourers who migrated between 1830 and 1920 from the colony of British India to several parts of the world.
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Tolerance and Irony
This project focuses on father and son Van Limburg Brouwer, who in the nineteenth century fought for tolerance and dialogue through literature in a society divided by strife.
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Books and Readers in the Long Eighteenth Century
This subproject aims to build digital infrastructure for book history and reception research by aggregating different types of source material, leveraging digital tools to make data from different sources and national contexts interoperable.
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The Hidden Occult
Medieval magical objects such as spell books and amulets are hidden in Dutch museums. Magic expert Dr Sandor Chardonnens helps identify these mystical treasures and gives them a place in history as well as in the museum.
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Ancient Weather Perspectives
This project investigates the way in which weather influenced the lives of people in Late Antiquity.
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Colonial Governmentality and Missionary Practices of Child Upbringing in Suriname, 1830-1930
This PhD project investigates policies and practices of child upbringing by missionary organisations in 19th and early 20th century colonial Suriname.
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Prefigurations of Peace
This project aims to uncover the existence of a hidden tradition, that of the poet-diplomat, in nineteenth-century English literature.