About

My name is Pim huijnen and this blog is about my work as a historian any other interests I pursue. I work as an assistant professor of digital cultural history at Utrecht University. My main interests are in the circulation of knowledge between science and popular culture. I use and develop digital techniques to do my research, mostly focusing on quantitative text analysis. However, I’m also experimenting with the digitisation of historical material, as well as with digital means of presentation, dissemination, and collaboration.

Before, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO funded project Translantis. This project used and developed digital technologies to analyse the role of reference cultures in debates about social issues and collective identities, looking specifically at the emergence of the United States in public discourse in the Netherlands from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War. I also worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO/CLARIN funded Biland project at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Arts. This project focused on the identity, intensity and location of discourses about heredity, genetics and eugenics in Dutch and German news media between 1863 and 1940. For this, we developed a text mining tool able to analyse and compare historical newspaper repositories from the Dutch National Library and the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.

I studied History at the University of Groningen from 1997 to 2003, where I wrote a MA-thesis on the Austrian theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest ((here in original and here as a peer-reviewed article in English). I received my MA-degree (cum laude) in the department of Modern History. After working for a short period at the Zentrum für Niederlande-Studien in Münster (Germany), I joined the editoral staff of the news and information website Duitslandweb.nl at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam in May 2004 and worked there until October 2013.

I started working on a doctoral thesis on the history of vitamin research in the Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam in the Spring of 2006. I received his PhD on June 24, 2011, on a book called De belofte van vitamines. Voedingsonderzoek tussen universiteit, industrie en overheid 1918-1945 (‘The promise of vitamins. Nutrition research between university, industry and state 1918-1945’). In the summer of 2011, I received a grant to stay at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

 

See also my LinkedIn profile.

E-mail: phuijnen[at]gmail.com

Twitter: @pimhuijnen