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On 30 July, historian Albert van der Zeijden passed away at the age of 64. His colleagues Dr Marijke Huisman and Dr Gertjan Plets wrote an in memoriam to commemorate him.

Proud to be (re)connected to the UU

Albert was affiliated with our cultural history group as a guest researcher in intangible heritage within a larger project in which he participated from the Knowledge Center Intangible Heritage Netherlands (KIEN). For Albert, being reconnected with Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ and specifically the cultural history research group was something he was very proud of, and also energized. Before Corona, he was at the Drift a day a week where he enthusiastically discussed his current research into heritage traditions with both distant and close colleagues, but also spoke passionately about Catholic culture and historiography (on which he obtained his doctorate in 2002) or other interests – such as his literary heroes Anthony Trollope and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the history of Lombok, the Utrecht neighborhood where he was born and grew up, and his current hometown of Egmond aan Zee.

A welcome guest lecturer

Within the small heritage and public history community at UU, he was also one of the driving forces behind the Heritage Lab and was an important and welcome guest in the education of Marijke and myself. A short time before the summer break, he got students thinking in a fascinating lecture about the role of heritage in the energy transition. It was always difficult to fit Albert in a guest lecture, because he was usually in some exotic country attending a UNESCO meeting or lobbying hard to get a Dutch tradition on the World Heritage List. 

The added value of the critical cultural historian

That certainly does not mean that Albert was a pure believer in the current heritage discourse in the Netherlands. He was particularly critical of the social discussion about changing traditions, and he was also a nuanced voice in the Zwarte Piet debate who wanted to push both the policy and the academic discussion in a different direction. In it he showed that cultural historians are an added value in discussions about heritage, and that armed with a strong theoretical framework and a historical perspective, they can bring a lot of extra perspective.

Plans for collaborations

During the second covid wave, Albert and some close colleagues were still making plans and writing applications to perpetuate the collaboration between KIEN and UU. We would “talk about it again when Corona is over", something we may have all said several times over the past year half to colleagues or friends. Over the past few months, he has been working hard with Hanneke Tuithof, Marijke Huisman and other colleagues from the department to get 'Shared authority' in education and research off the ground at the UU and to think about how we as academic historians can better share our authority with both students and social partners.

He may leave a void in research and education, but Albert was first and foremost a very nice man, who spoke enthusiastically with everyone in the department. You might disagree with him, he was always very amiable and ready for a chat.

Marijke and Gertjan