PhD Student
Thesis Title
Paradise Lost: The Biblical Fashioning of the East Indies in Dutch Chorographical Accounts, 1596-1726
Supervisor
Professor Dániel Margócsy
Professor Ulinka Rublack FBA (Advisor)
Thesis Description
Biblical concepts were a key element in early modern Dutch representations of Asia, and played an essential role in the development of European cultures of empiricism. Historians, art historians, and scholars of orientalism, including Svetlana Alpers, Harold Cook, Claudia Swan, and Benjamin Schmidt have emphasised the imperialist and commercial inflections of Dutch representations of the world. My thesis, by contrast, shows how Dutch chorographical writings about Asia were closely intertwined with popular debates in Biblical philology taking place in the Netherlands. Through four case studies, my thesis demonstrates how Dutch merchants, ministers, and colonial administrators used concepts such as the Garden of Eden, idolatry, Satan, monotheism, Noachic descent, the location of Ophir, Hebrew rituals, and the Book of Nature to construct an Indian Ocean World which was an extension of the world of the Old Testament. This world was both observable and describable, giving rise to a form of Biblical empiricism that was only possible among the philologically literate population of the Dutch Republic.
Publications
(Forthcoming) 'Paradise Lost: The Devil, Colonial Government, and Curiosity in Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Itinerario (1596)', Journal of the History of Ideas.
(Book Review) 'Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe', The British Journal for the History of Science 56, no.1 (2023), 121-123.
'Hoe woorden een kerk sloopten: over het tragische lot van de Delftse Sint-Hippolytuskerk', Kleio: Voor Docenten Geschiedenis en Staatsinrichting, 57 (2016), 62-63.
Awards
Het Cultuurfonds Scholarship
Teaching Experience
Supervisor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge (2024-2025)
Part IB: History and Philosophy of Science
Supervisor, Faculty of History, Cambridge (2023-2024)
T9: Nature and Knowledge c.1500-1800
Supervisor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge (2022-2024)
Part II, Paper 1: Early Science and Medicine
Supervision Coordinator, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge
(2023-2024)
Conversational English for Ukrainian Refugees employed by Jesus College, Cambridge
(2023-2024)
Conferences and Public Engagement
Between Currency and Pigment: Painting Exoticism in De Heem's still lifes, Fitzwilliam Museum, 11 April 2025.
Datura: Between Empire, Satan, and the Sacred, Cambridge Festival of Ideas, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 27 March 2025.
Paradise Lost: Fashioning the East Indies aboard a VOC ship in 1623, Cabinet of Natural History seminar, Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, 10 March 2025.
"His Wisdom Has Given us Much to Wonder at": Dutch Geography and Religion around 1600, 2024 HSS Annual Meeting, Mérida, Mexico, 7-10 November 2024.
The Enchanted World and the History of Science, Just Life, Radio Maria England, 28 October 2023.
Marketing idolatry in the early modern European knowledge economy, Cambridge-Tübingen workshop on the history of religion, University of Cambridge, 11-12 September 2023.
"They say that gold is our God": fetishism in Dutch early seventeenth-century travel literature, Reformation Studies Colloquium, University of Liverpool, 6-8 September 2023.
Chorography and Calvinist conversion in VOC domains: the case of François Valentyn's ethnography of Ambonese religion, BSHS Annual Meeting 2022, Queens University, Belfast, 20-23 July 2022.
Katholiek Erfgoed in Delft ('Catholic Heritage in Delft'), Historische Vereniging Delfia Batavorum, Delft, 17 November 2016.
Het Oude- en Nieuwe Gasthuis te Delft ('The Old- and New Hospital in Delft'), Tweede Pecha Kucha over de Canon van Delft, Historische Vereniging Delfia Batavorum, 8 September 2016.
Other Activities
Countertenor, Trinity College Choir
