Academic staff

  • Dr Swantje Falcke (Programme Coordinator)

    Swantje Falcke is Assistent Professor in Economic and Social History specialized in the field of migration. Swantje has analyzed different questions on migrant integration and naturalization in the Netherlands and Germany. Currently, Swantje is developing a new research line analyzing the impact of environmental change on migration in a long-term perspective.

  • Dr Ren茅 Koekkoek (Programme Coordinator)

    Ren茅 Koekkoek is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political History. His research focuses on how, why, and in which historical contexts certain political ideas, institutions, and practices, such as the redress of historical injustices, citizenship, freedom, slavery, and democracy, emerged and evolved over time. In doing so, he concentrates particularly on the era of the Atlantic Revolutions and, more recently, on anticolonial politicians and thinkers of the twentieth century.

  • Dr Irina Marin

    Irina Marin is Assistant Professor in Political History at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. She specializes in Modern European History with emphasis on Central and Eastern European history, in particular the social dynamics of imperial borderlands, nationalism and identity politics as well as social violence. Her book Peasant Violence and Antisemitism in Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) was awarded an Honourable Mention by the American Society for Romanian Studies (). She is involved in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion projects at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视 ().

  • Dr Corinne Boter聽(Core Teacher Internships)

    Corinne Boter is Assistant Professor Economic and Social History. Her research agenda seeks to understand the long-term development of gender labour market inequality over the past two centuries. 

  • Prof. James Kennedy

    James Kennedy (1963) is Professor of Modern Dutch History at the Faculty of Humanities and Distinguished 木瓜福利影视 Professor with a special assignment on community engaged learning at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. His expertise is postwar history, in the first instance the Netherlands but also with an eye to transnational and comparative perspectives.

  • Dr Devin Vartija

    Devin Vartija is Assistant Professor in Political History at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. He is an intellectual historian who specialises in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, examining the tensions between equality and racialism in European thought. Within the MA History of Politics and Society, he teaches the course 鈥楧emocracy and Democratization鈥 and supervises MA theses. 

  • Dr Jessica Dijkman

    Jessica Dijkman is Associate Professor in Economic History, who studies the way societies in late medieval and early modern Europe coped with food crises and famines.

  • Dr. Laura Almagor

    Laura Almagor is Assistant Professor in Political History and specializes in modern Jewish history. She coordinates the MA elective 鈥淕lobal Nationalisms Revisited鈥, which runs in period 2. In her own research, Laura is interested in the intersection of Jewish history and issues of migration, colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as in various manifestations of Jewish and non-Jewish nationalist and internationalist ideologies. Laura鈥檚 monograph Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement (The Littman Library for Jewish Civilization, 2022) was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her current Gerda Henkel Stiftung-funded project looks at post-Holocaust Jewish self-identification in the context of early decolonization processes.

  • Dr. Maanik Nath

    Maanik Nath is Assistant Professor in Economic and Social History and teaches the Capitalism and Colonialism elective course in period 1 of the MA programme. His research expertise is in the economic history of the non-western world, and he is especially interested in the relationships between colonialism and economic development from 1800 to the present day. His recently published book, Capital Shortage, investigates climate, courts and capital in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. It is published by Cambridge 木瓜福利影视 Press and won the First Monograph Prize in Economic and Social History in 2024.

  • Dr. Roberta Biasillo

    Roberta Biasillo is an Assistant Professor in Political History, and her research interests lie at the confluence of environmental history, colonial history, and political history. She has explored stories of ecosystems 鈥 such as forests and wetlands 鈥 in 19th-century Italy and the role of African colonial environments in shaping Italian fascist state and empire. Among other publications, she has co-authored the volume Mussolini鈥檚 Nature. An Environmental History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2022). She is currently working on a research project on the global environmental history of Modern Libya. Within the MA programme, Roberta coordinates the course Authoritarian Regimes and the Environment.

  • Dr. Vigyan Ratnoo

    Vigyan Ratnoo is Assistant Professor in Economic and Social History with broad interests in long-run development, globalization and colonialism. His research focusses on the role and interplay of geography and institutions in the long-run development of South Asia. He uses historical data from the colonial period to analyse and compare patterns of development across the subcontinent. Within the MA programme he coordinates the core course Politics and Society in Comparative Perspective, which combines learning about relevant historical theories and cases with learning about research design and methods, both generally and from a comparative perspective.

  • Dr. Maria Falina

    Maria Falina is Assistant Professor in Political History at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. She is a historian of modern East-Central Europe and Russia who specialises in the history of political thought, history of democracy, nationalism, memory, and religion. Within the MA History of Politics and Society, she coordinates and teaches the core course 鈥From Chaos to Order: How Does the Past Influence the Present? and is the MA thesis coordinator.