22 September 2020
Nicholas Carr is assistant professor at the department of English. He was educated at the university of Queensland and at the university of Cambridge, where he completed an MPhil and a PhD in 2013. Prior to joining the UvA’s English Department in 2016, he worked at Griffith University and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Nick researches the intersection of history and literature, and the ways in which literary theory can be used to investigate historical scholarship. With a particular focus on the United States, his work examines the alignment between nineteenth-century narrative historiography and the tradition of the realist novel. Aspects of this project, which forms the basis of a manuscript nearing completion, have recently been published in New Literary History and Modern Language Quarterly.
Maaike Voorhoeve is assistant professor at the department of Arabic language and culture. After a PhD on legal practice in the field of contemporary Tunisian family law (UvA, 2011), she held post-doctoral positions at Harvard's Islamic Legal Studies Program, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), and the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. She also obtained research funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Maaike's research pertains to gender-coded law in colonial and post-colonial contexts in the Arab world, with a geographic focus on North-Africa. She teaches courses on Islamic law, law and gender in Muslim contexts, and transitional justice in the Arab World.
Melvin Wevers is assistant professor of urban history and digital methods. In his research, Wevers focuses on the development and application of computational methods for cultural-historical research. In his thesis Consuming America (Utrecht, 2016) he applied text mining to digitized newspapers to investigate the role of the United States as a ‘reference culture’ in public debates about consumerism. In 2016 he was a visiting fellow at UCLA and researcher-in-residence at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in 2017. During his postdoc at the KNAW Humanities Cluster Melvin published on gender bias in historical newspapers and the relationship between distributional semantics and the theories of Reinhart Koselleck. Melvin currently works on applying image recognition techniques to historical material and is completing a study in which he models career prospects within the VOC.