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As a social historian of the early modern Low Countries (1500-1800), Erika Kuijpers explores how people in the past told stories about themselves. Her research delves into the cultural toolkit available to them, focusing on themes of social relations, identity, memory, knowledge practices, emotional culture, and religiosity.

Her methodology is interdisciplinary and forward-looking. She applies insights from psychology and the social sciences and employs new computational text analysis methods to unlock previously unknown patterns from historical sources.

Erika is a member of the editorial board of popular historical magazine Geschiedenis Magazine and regularly speaks for a variety of audiences.

Chronicling novelty. New knowledge in the Netherlands, 1500-1850

Erika Kuijpers collaborated with Judith Pollmann (Leiden University) on a research project focussing on the circulation and reception of new knowledge, ideas and technologies among middle class writers of local chronicles between 1500 and 1850.

More information on the project can be found on this website.

Previous work:

Erika Kuijpers started her career as a social historian of migration. In 2005 she defended her doctoral thesis on migrants and social relations in 17th century Amsterdam (Utrecht University, 2005). Between 2005 and 2008 she has been working on the history of labourmarkets and labour relations.

From 2008-2013 she worked at Leiden University on personal memories and traumatic experiences of the Dutch Revolt in the context of the research project ‘Tales of the revolt: memory, oblivion and identity in the Low Countries, 1566 – 1700’.

At VU she participated in several projects that explored digital humanities approaches and computational methods for the semantic mining of early modern texts. 

Erika Kuijpers teaches early modern history of the Netherlands. She is director of the Master Programme History.

2007: Keetje Hodshonprijs, Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen

Editorial board popular historical magazine Geschiedenis Magazine