Michiel van Groesen is Professor of Maritime History at the Leiden University Institute for History.

More information about Michiel van Groesen

Michiel van Groesen is Professor of Maritime History at the Leiden University Institute for History.

The chair in Maritime History is established at Leiden’s Institute for History since 1978. In close cooperation with maritime heritage institutions in the Netherlands, most importantly Het Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam and the Maritime Museum Rotterdam, scholars in Leiden challenge students to ask new questions and find new answers for global and local developments in maritime history. For more information about the MA-programme in Maritime History, click here.

Research

My interest in maritime history is embedded in the culture of the early modern Dutch Republic and the Atlantic world. Broadly speaking my research is interdisciplinary in nature, focusing on the culture of imperial expansion and the politics of global interactions. My current book project, provisionally entitled An Ocean of Rumours: News and Information in the Atlantic World, explores the circulation of transoceanic news, focusing on the tension between distance and credibility in the early modern world. The book is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

In prior research I examined early modern printed travel accounts, more specifically the monumental De Bry collection of voyages that disseminated very influential textual and visual images of the non-European world. I argued that the De Brys manipulated the original accounts for a confessionally divided readership. The German editions were aimed at a Protestant audience, the Latin translations were sold in Catholic Europe. Both versions - despite their differences - helped to legitimate European colonialism in the next two centuries.

Since then I have worked on the rise and fall of Dutch Brazil as seen through the eyes of the Amsterdam print media. In 2014 I edited a volume of essays entitled The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (Cambridge), which discusses the impact the short-lived colony had on the Atlantic world from the seventeenth century until today. My second book, Amsterdam's Atlantic, came out with Penn Press in 2017. Using newspapers, prints, maps, paintings, pamphlets, and diaries, I demonstrate that Dutch Brazil transformed (and was transformed by) the early modern media landscape at home, and marked the emergence of a 'public' Atlantic world.

Curriculum vitae

• 2019 Visiting Fellow, Princeton University
• 2014-2019 NWO-Vidi Research Fellow
• 2013 Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University
• 2011 Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
• 2008 - 2015 Assistant/Associate Professor of Early Modern History, University of Amsterdam
• 2008 - 2012 NWO-Veni Research Fellow

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