Seminars

Forthcoming Seminars

  • Click here for a list of upcoming events

For enquiries relating to seminars please contact Ben Kaplan: b.kaplan@ucl.ac.uk

Current Seminars

Low Countries History Seminar, 2019/20 (IHR London, UK)
  • Convenors: Liesbeth Corens (Queen Mary), Anne Goldgar (King’s College London), Ben Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL), Joanna Woodall (Courtauld)
  • Meetings: Fridays at 5:15 pm at the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. All meetings will be held in Wolfson Room I, in the basement. All welcome!
  • Website: https://www.history.ac.uk/seminars/low-countries-history

Autumn Term

  • 27 September – Jonas van Tol (Amsterdam), “William of Orange and the French Wars of Religion”
  • 11 October – Karen Hollewand (Utrecht), “Sex and scholarship: the banishment of Hadriaan Beverland”
  • 22 November – Anne Goldgar (KCL), “Marketing Arctic knowledge: travel literature and the passions in the seventeenth century”

Spring Term

  • 17 January – Daniel Margócsy (Cambridge), “A Disease of ships and intestines: a maritime history of worms”
  • 31 January – Mark Ponte (Amsterdam), “‘All blacks that come to this city’: An Afro-Atlantic community in seventeenth-century Amsterdam”
  • 14 February – Jelle van Lottum (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam), “Labour migration to the Dutch Republic: a maritime perspective”
  • 13 March – Ad Putter (Bristol), “The Dutch Hat Makers of Medieval London”
  • 27 March – Freya Sierhuis (York), F“A Dutch ‘Sonderweg’? Geerard Brandt’s Historie der Reformatie”

Summer Term

  • 1 May – Margaret Schotte (York University, Ontario), “‘Paper Sailors’: Competing Notions of Expertise in Dutch Nautical Manuals”
  • 15 May – Michael Depreter (Oxford), “The Count of Flanders, the Towns, and England. Patterns of Competing and Complementary Diplomacies in Times of Revolt (14th–15th centuries)” 

Past Seminars (Archive)

2016-17

Convenors: Anne Goldgar (KCL), Benjamin Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL), Joanna Woodall (Courtauld)

Featuring speakers from the Low Countries and further afield, as well as from Britain, the Low Countries seminar is an opportunity for scholars and students to keep up-to-date on the latest work in Low Countries history.

Meetings: Fridays at 5:15 pm at the Institute for Historical Research. Except where indicated otherwise, all meetings take place in the Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House, WC1E 7HU.

Autumn Term

21 OctoberBruno Blondé (Antwerp), ‘The straw mattresses of a love triangle: Economic growth, social inequality and early modern consumer changes in the eighteenth-century Low Countries’
4 November

Stijn van Rossem (London), ‘Editorial Strategies in the early-modern period: the Verdussen case (Antwerp, 1590-1690)’

Venue: Room N304, Senate House

18 November

David Freeman (Kansas City), ‘A Silver River in a Silver World: Dutch merchants in the South Atlantic, 1640s-1740s’ - joint session with the Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World seminar

Venue: tbc

 2 DecemberNina Lamal (St Andrews), ‘The Low Countries in the news: Italian information networks on the Dutch Revolt’

Spring Term

10 FebruaryHelmer Helmers (Amsterdam), ‘Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Dutch Print Culture and International Relations, 1568-1648’
24 FebruaryChris Nierstrasz (Rotterdam), ‘The Dutch East India Company and the Atlantic (1700-1800)’
10 MarchMeredith Hale (Cambridge), `”Reading” visual satire: Romeyn de Hooghe’s Nieuw Liedt’ 
24 MarchRichard Blakemore (Reading), ‘Empire and identity: British seafarers in Amsterdam and Rotterdam during the seventeenth century’

Summer Term

5 MayJan Willem Honig (London), ‘Combating Brutality and Excess in War: Lessons from the Dutch Revolt of the 1570s and 1580s’
19 MayDanielle van den Heuvel (Amsterdam), ‘The Freedom of the Streets: Gender and Urban Space in early modern Holland’ 

2015-16

Convenors: Anne Goldgar (KCL), Benjamin Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL), Joanna Woodall (Courtauld)

Featuring speakers from the Low Countries and further afield, as well as from Britain, the Low Countries seminar is an opportunity for scholars and students to keep up-to-date on the latest work in Low Countries history.

Meetings: Fridays at 5:15 pm at the Institute for Historical Research. Except where indicated otherwise, all meetings take place in the Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, North block, Senate House, WC1E 7HU.

Autumn Term

23 OctoberGijs Rommelse (Haarlemmermeer Lyceum), ‘Johan de Witt’s navy as a strategic instrument and an ideological construct’
6 November

An Van Camp (Oxford), ‘Drawing in Silver and Gold: metalpoint drawings from the Low Countries’ (attendees may wish to visit the associated exhibition at the British Museum, which runs 10 September 6 December)

Venue: Holden Room 103, 1st floor, South block, Senate House

20 NovemberThomas Balfe (Courtauld), ‘Nature bites back: world upside-down images with a hunting theme in the early modern Netherlands’

Spring Term

15 JanuaryAriadne Schmidt (Leiden), ‘Crime and gender before the Dutch courts, 1600-1810’
12 FebruaryJeroen Puttevils (Antwerp), ‘Designing markets for gambling in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries: the case of lotteries’
11 MarchBart Ramakers (Groningen), ‘Paradigms of Virtue: Building Moral Character in the Early Modern Netherlands’
18 March

David Ormrod (Kent) and Valentina Caldari (Oxford), ‘Trade rivalry, foreign policy and the crises of the 1620s in England and the Netherlands’ - joint session with the Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World seminar 

Venue: Room SH243, 2nd floor, South block, Senate House

Summer Term 

6 MaySachiko Kusakawa (Cambridge), ‘The Dutch contexts of William Courten’s (1642-1702) Collections’
20 MayMyriam Greilsammer (Bar Ilan), ‘The Uuterste Wille of Lowys Porquin (1563): Catholic Schoolbook or Subversive Calvinist Educational Manual?’
 3 JuneCatherine Arnold (Yale), ‘ “Through the powerful Intercession of the Maritime Powers”: Religious Networks, Transnational Lobbying, and Anglo-Dutch interventions on behalf of foreign Protestants and Jews, 1690-1748’

2014-15

Convenors: Anne Goldgar (KCL), Benjamin Kaplan (UCL), Ulrich Tiedau (UCL)

Featuring speakers from the Low Countries and further afield, as well as from Britain, the Low Countries seminar is an opportunity for scholars and students to keep up-to-date on the latest work in Low Countries history.

Friday afternoons at 5:15pm.

Venue: Past and Present Room 202, 2nd floor, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House.

Autumn Term

10 OctoberTheo Hermans (UCL), ‘Miracles in Translation. Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch Translations’
24 OctoberSebastian Felten (KCL), ‘Monetisation in the periphery of the Netherlands, c.1700-1900’
21 NovemberJaap Verheul (Utrecht), ‘The Atlantic Pilgrim: John Lothrop Motley and the American Discovery of the Netherlands’

Spring Term

16 JanuarySina Rauschenbach (Potsdam), `Jesuits, Remonstrants, and Jews: Theological Encounters in the Early Modern Dutch Republic’
30 JanuaryAlastair Hamilton (Warburg), ‘Audacity and compromises: Arabic Studies in Utrecht in the early eighteenth century’
13 FebruaryKaren Hearn (UCL), ‘The Netherlandishness of 16th and 17th Century British Art: the Case of Cornelius Johnson’
27 FebruaryClaudia Swan (Northwestern), `Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten: Episodes in the History of Material Culture of the Dutch Republic’

Summer Term

15 MayJaap Geraerts (UCL), ‘Contested rights: the Dutch Catholic nobility and the jus patronatus, c. 1580-1720’
29 MayVera Keller (Oregon), ‘The World of Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633): Transnational Science and Dutch Historiography’

2013-14

This annual series sees regular seminars held about ten times over the course of each academic session. Featuring speakers from the Low Countries and further afield, as well as from Britain, it is an opportunity for scholars and students to keep up-to-date on the latest work in Low Countries history.

Multidisciplinary, it includes talks on art history and literary history, as well as history narrowly defined.

Friday afternoons at 5:15pm.*

Autumn Term

Oct 18Timon Screech (SOAS),
‘The Dutch, the English and the Northeast Passage to Japan, 1600-1615’  (co-sponsored with Japan400)		SH Athlone
Nov 1Hugh Dunthorne (Swansea),
`The Revolt of the Netherlands and its impact on early modern Britain’		SH Athlone
Nov 15Joris van Eijnatten (Utrecht),
‘Willem Bilderdijk, Lord of Teisterbant. Metaphysics, Religion and Politics in the Age of Revolutions’		ST B9
Nov 29Guido van Meersbergen (UCL),
`Diplomatic Encounters between East and West: Dutch Envoys at the Mughal Court (1648-1713)’		SH Athlone

Spring Term

Jan 24Jesse Spohnholz (Washington State U),
‘Seeing Like a Church: Solving a 450-Year-Old Mystery and Rethinking the Dutch Reformation’		SH Athlone
Feb 7Andrew Armstrong (Queen Mary),
‘Translating poetic capital in 15th-century Brussels: from Amé de Montgesoie’s Pas de la Mort to Colijn Caillieu’s Dal sonder Wederkeeren’		SH Bedford
Mar 7Martine Gosselink (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam),
‘The Rijksmuseum and its art and historical collections: a peaceful wedding?’		SH Athlone
Mar 21Mark Hay (King’s College London),
‘Revolutionary ideas on taxation: The Dutch fiscal policy of the period 1795-1814’		SH Bedford

Summer Term

May 9Liesbeth Corens (Cambridge),
‘Religious Coexistence in a Low Countries Health Resort: Protestants and Catholics at Spa’		SH Athlone
June 6Claudia Swan (Northwestern U, Boston),
‘Piracy, Porcelain, Profit: Exotic Negotiations and Early Seventeenth-Century Global Politics’		SH Athlone

*Please note: due to refurbishment work at the IHR, seminars this year meet in alternative locations - see schedule - and 15 mins later than previously.
SH Athlone = Senate House, Athlone Room, located in the South Block on the 1st floor, room 102.  SH Bedford = Senate House, Bedford Room, South Block on the ground floor, room G37.  STB 9 = Stewart House, adjacent to Senate House, at 32 Russell Square, room 9 in the basement.