Iris van der Zande, MA

Iris van der Zande finished her Bachelor History, Media and Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Research Master at the University of Amsterdam. During her bachelor she was fascinated by ego-documents, especially travel journals, and therefore wrote her thesis on travel experiences of Dutch cruise tourists to Norway in the interwar period. For her master thesis she examined the Rotterdam workhouse (1800-1815) and focused on emotional expressions, gender, space and crime and punishment within the walls of the institute.

In her research, Iris focuses on the use and meaning of space, agency, emotional behavior and gender. She uses a cultural-historical approach and is interested in a variety of subjects, ranging from the agency of prisoners, cruise tourism and the history of the Saint-Nicolas celebration in the Netherlands.

Currently, she is working on her research project: The Power of the Prisoner. Agency, emotions and gender in nineteenth-century Dutch Prisons. This research is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through the PhD-in-the-Humanities-programme.