On 27 June 2025, the Network for Environmental Humanities (NEH) celebrates the pioneering, socially engaged research being conducted by our junior scholars in the humanities with the Symposium ‘Bracing for imapct: Junior scholars on the Anthropocene’. The topics relate various issues related to the Anthropocene – the overlapping climate, environmental and biodiversity crises. The NEH…

On 11 September 2025, Posthumus alumnus Dániel Moerman will defend the PhD thesis ‘A hydrosocial history of drought and societal resilience in the cities of Deventer and Zutphen, 1500-1900’ at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Supervisors are Professor Petra van Dam (VU Amsterdam), Dr Milja van Tielhof (Huygens Institute), and Dr Bob Pierik (VU Amsterdam). The…

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded several fellows of the N.W. Posthumus Institute an NWO XS Grant. This grant is awarded for ideas with a maximum budget of 50,000 euro that hold great promise and aim to enable proposals for curiosity-driven, innovative research in the research fields covered by the NWO Domain Social Sciences…

Posthumus Fellow emeritus Professor Peer Vries and Annelieke Vries-Baaijens recently published their book The rise of the modern state in Europe, 1450-1914. Whereas the current world consists of states with their own, demarcated, usually contiguous territory, and recognised authority, in the Late Middle Ages legitimacy of government authority was not based on institutionalised participation by…

Recently, Leuven University Press has issued a new edition of TSEG – The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, the Dutch-Flemish academic journal on social and economic history. The latest edition contains a lot of interesting articles, some authored by Posthumus fellows, among which an article by Reinder Klinkhamer on the response of…

For the NWO-funded Vici-project ‘Care and Coercion. Patriarchy, (Forced) Labour and Caregiving in the Household in the Dutch Empire, c. 1750-Present’, the research group of Economic and Social Historyis hiring three postdoctoral researchers, who will study the intricate relations between care and coercion in households in the Dutch Empire. The positions are divided in three different…

On 2 June 2025, Posthumus alumna Heleen Blommers successfully defended the PhD thesis ‘Deconstructing the War on Poverty: why a failure narrative became entrenched in American political discourse, 1964–1974’ at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Supervisors were Professor Karel Davids (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Dr Dienke Hondius (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), and Professor Damian Pargas (Leiden University). Heleen’s…

The news magazine de Volkskrant and the International Institute of Social History (IISH) are welcoming submissions for the Volkskrant-IISH Thesis prize 2025. The prize of 1,500 euros is annually awarded to a student who, according to the jury, has written the most innovative master’s thesis at a Dutch university. For the 2025 edition, Master theses…

From 30 June 30 to 2 July 2025, CLARIAH will host its annual Summer School at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. This event is designed for advanced MA students and researchers interested in digital heritage and humanities approaches that are broadly applicable in various fields: history, heritage studies, oral history, media studies,…

On 27 and 28 May 2025, the Posthumus Conference 2025 was held in Nijmegen at Radboud University, hosted by Dr Dries Lyna and Dr Joris van den Tol and visited by c. 140 participants. This year’s conference was on the central theme ‘The People vs Structures’ with a reflection on how legal systems, institutions, and…