I am Associate Professor in Early Modern History and currently the director of the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH). I am a member and former director of the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History (ACUH).
My work concentrates on 16th- and 17th-century Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular interest in urban history and the social and cultural history of politics. My current research project investigates social unrest, popular politics and archival repression in early modern Venice. The Venetian Republic has long fascinated historians as the epitome of political stability: other pre-modern states went through cycles of revolts, while Venice seemed immune to class struggles. Its ruling elite remained in power for a thousand years, until 1797. In this project I examine how protest was suppressed in the streets and repressed on paper. Part of this research has been published in The Journal of Modern History.
I have a broad interest in social, economic and political history of the early modern period, with publications on a broad range of topics, including early modern trade, diplomacy, urban graffiti, Dutch renegades and converts to Islam. I co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History on cross-confessional diplomacy in the early modern Mediterranean with Tijana Krstic (CEU): http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15700658/19/2-3
I studied Economic and Social History at the University of Amsterdam and the Università di Ca' Foscari di Venezia. For my PhD (2007) on Dutch and Flemish merchants in early modern Venice, I spent a lot of time in the Venetian, Florentine and Vatican archives, supported by two grants from the Marie Curie programme "European Doctorate in the Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean". NWO awarded me a VENI grant in 2011 for a project on informal politics and diplomacy in early modern Venice. That year I also spent a semester as Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2013 I was Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Fellow at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America (New York). With an Aspasia grant from NWO I am currently working on a project on Venetian protest and the politics of forgetting. In 2018-2019, I was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.