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

Currently, I am working on my research project: The Power of the Prisoner: Agency, Emotions and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Dutch Prisons. This research is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through the PhD-in-the-Humanities-programme. In this project I examine the power of prisoners from a cultural perspective. Especially emotional practices and the manipulation of ideas of femininity and masculinity by prisoners – both men and women – play a key role in this research. I am interested in how suppressive systems leave room for individual agency and how, at the same time, individual agency is limited by structure.