PhD Student
Thesis Title
Paradise Lost: The Religious Fashioning of the East Indies in Dutch Chorographical Accounts, 1596-1726
Supervisor
Professor Dániel Margócsy
Professor Ulinka Rublack FBA (Advisor)
Thesis Description
My thesis argues that religious understandings of landscape were a key element in early modern Dutch representations of Asia, and they played an essential role in the development of European cultures of empiricism. Historians, art historians, and scholars of orientalist, including Svetlana Alpert, 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 religious conversion was equally important in Northern European colonial endeavours and the print culture they generated, though taking a different shape to the better-studied cases of the Jesuit, Capuchin, and Franciscan missions. Through four case studies that span the long seventeenth century, my thesis demonstrates that Dutch merchants, ministers, and colonial administrators engaged closely with religious and cosmological realities when producing chirographical accounts about the Indian Ocean World, giving it an evolving immanence that was both observable and describable.
Publications
(Forthcoming) 'Hell in the Indies: 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
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
