Jeroen Duindam

About

The comparative study of rulers and elites forms the core of my research. As connections between rulers and elites were formed partly at the dynastic court; this institution plays a key role in my work. Initially concentrating on early modern France and the Austrian Habsburg lands in the European dynastic context, I have been moving towards a global perspective including the Ottoman empire and Late Imperial China as well as Africa. Studying history (major) and anthropology (minor) at Utrecht University, I was struck by the different approaches to kingship and ritual in these disciplines. This contrast led me to write a critical dissertation on Norbert Elias’ theory of court life, 'Macht en Mythe' (1992), published in an expanded and translated edition as 'Myths of Power' in 1995. In the years before submitting my dissertation, I combined various teaching positions with a job as bassoonist. From 1991 to 2008, I held a sequence of assistant- and associate professorships at the Utrecht History Department, in cultural history, history of international relations, and political history. In these years I also actively participated in the restructuring of the department’s curriculum. In 2008 I was appointed to the chair for early modern history at Groningen, followed by an appointment to the general history chair at Leiden University in September 2010. Currently, I serve as Academic Director of the Leiden University Institute for History, a task I perform until the end of 2024. A 1999-2000 NWO-research leave allowed me to write my comparative study on the courts of 'Vienna and Versailles', published by Cambridge University Press in 2003 (translated into Italian, Spanish, and Japanese). My role in the management committee of COST-Action 36: 'Tributary Empires Compared. Romans, Ottomans, Mughals and beyond' (2005-2010) helped me to globalise my research interests, facilitating the organisation of various conferences and the publication of volumes in my Brill-series Rules & Elites (https://brill.com/view/serial/RULE). Between 2011 and 2016, I led the NWO-funded Horizon programme 'Eurasian Empires', including nine researchers based at three Dutch universities. Following this extended preparatory phase of global research on empires, kingship, and dynasty, I wrote 'Dynasties. A global history of power 1300-1800' (Cambridge University Press 2016). In 2019 Oxford University Press published my bird’s eye view of dynasty from ancient Egypt to the 21st century: 'Dynasty. A Very Short Introduction'. In September 2017-February 2023 NWO funded my proposal on 'Monarchy in Turmoil Rulers, Courts and Politics in the Netherlands And Germany, C.1780 – C.1820'. This research effort explored the temporal boundaries of Revolution and Restoration, reassessing the largely unknown role of households and their involvement in politics during this turbulent period. A volume reflecting outcomes of the project will be published by Brill: Courts and Politics in an Age of Reform (c. 1780-1830) in 2024 (in addition to a monograph published by Joost Welten in June 2023 and a dissertation to be submitted by Quinten Somsen in the fall of 2023). Currently I am thinking about a comparative project on the global history of matriliny and matrifocality, an offshoot of my global interest in dynastic of kinship and succession.