Biography

I am a historian of early modern Europe and its interactions with the wider world. More specifically, my research interests relate to cross-cultural encounters, discourses of race and ethnicity, and the comparative histories of colonialism and empire.
My doctoral research, which I conducted at University College London (UCL), focused on the intersections between East India Company enterprise and ethnographic discourse. In December 2014 I defended my PhD thesis, entitled ‘Ethnography and Encounter: Dutch and English Approaches to Cross-Cultural Contact in Seventeenth-Century South Asia’.
Before coming to the EUI, I briefly held teaching positions at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. In addition to supervising BA and MA theses in the fields of colonial and global history, I have taught an introduction to historical research as well as modules on Reformation Europe, World History, and the Philosophy of Science.
As a Max Weber Fellow, I will start working on a new research project which is to result in a comparative analysis of early modern Euro-Asian diplomatic encounters. Taking cues from the so-called New Diplomatic History, this project will focus on the informal approaches and interpersonal connections of individual actors involved in forging diplomatic exchanges ‘on the ground’.