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Professor Benjamin Kaplan

Office: 307, 25 Gordon Square Office hour: Tuesdays 3-5 External phone: 020 7679 1338 Internal phone: 31338 E-mail: b.kaplan@ucl.ac.uk Dutch History at UCL website Homepage: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucrabjk/

I specialise in the history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the religious history of early modern Europe. I am Tutor of UCL’s MA in the Dutch Golden Age, co-convenor of the Low Countries Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, and vice-president of the Society for Netherlandic History, in New York.

Much of my research focuses on the practice of religious toleration and religious conflict in European history, trying to explain their causes, patterns, and forms.  I have a particular interest in phenomena such as `mixed' (interfaith) marriage, conversion, and the spatial accommodation of dissenting worship. My last book was Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, published in 2007 by Harvard University Press.  It was awarded a prize by the American Academy of Religion.

My principal current project, entitled Cunegonde's Kidnapping, is a microhistorical study of religious conflict in the 18th century in the Dutch-German-Belgian border region of Limburg.  To pursue it and related work I have been awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust and a Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 

Areas of Research Supervision

 -History of the Low Countries, 16th - 18th Centuries

 -Reformation and early modern European religious history

 -Early Modern European Cultural and Social History

Theses Currently Supervised

Guido van Meersbergen is comparing the ethnographic discourses of the Dutch and English East India Companies regarding the peoples and states of the Indian subcontinent. 

Jaap Geraerts is working on the Catholic nobility of Utrecht and their contribution to the survival of Catholicism in the Dutch Republic.

Theses Previously Supervised

 'Strangers and Neighbours: The Tactics of Toleration in the Exile Community of Wesel, 1550-1590', supervised at the University of Iowa. This thesis won a prize from the German Historical Institute and has recently been published.

Teaching

HIST1001:From the Ancient Near East to the Twenty-First Century (Early Modern section)

HIST2312: Religious Reformation and Popular Piety 1450-1650

HIST3313/9313: Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries

HIST6309: Early Modern Europe

HIST7316: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Modern Europe

HISTG018: The Dutch Golden Age (MA course, 40 credits)

HISTG024: From Renaissance to Republic: The Netherlands c.1555-1609 (MA course, 20 credits)

Select Publications

	Boundaries and Their Meanings in the History of the Netherlands, ed. with Marybeth Carlson and Laura Cruz (Brill, 2009)
	Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570-1720, ed. with Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann (Manchester, 2008)
	Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2007)
	Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment, ed. with Marc R. Forster (Ashgate, 2005)
	Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578-1620 (Oxford University Press, 1995)

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