After a bachelor and research master in Art History at Utrecht University (both ‘cum laude’), I obtained my doctoral degree at the University of Amsterdam in 2015 with a dissertation on the social and artistic integration of Netherlandish painters in early modern Naples (supervisor: Eric Jan Sluijter, published in 2019 with AUP ). Between 2015 and 2017 I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project ‘LexArt : words for art 1600-1750’ at the University of Montpellier III – Paul Valéry (PI: Michèle-Caroline Heck). Subsequently, I was a researcher in the FNS-funded project ‘Un siècle d’or? Repenser la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle’ at the University of Geneva from 2017 until 2022 (PI: Jan Blanc), a guest researcher at Ghent University (2022-’23) and a visiting fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
I am a specialist of early modern art, in particular of the Low Countries and Italy. Thus far, my research and publications have explored topics like artist mobility and migration, cultural exchange, artistic practices and theory, pictorial genres , art terminology including notions of ‘talent’ and ‘technique’, digital humanities, travel literature, the early modern notion of (artistic) creativity, and temporality (Roma 1629: una microstoria dell’arte, 2021; Revisiting Presentism, with J. Blanc, T. Brero, E. Lecuppre-Desjardin). A profound curiosity about the conditions in which artists conceived and created their work within a society unites these themes. I am managing editor of Early Modern Low Countries (interdisciplinary journal), and a member of the editorial boards of Gouden Eeuw (Brepols, book series) and the Zeven Provinciën Reeks (Uitgeverij Verloren, book series for the general Dutch audience).
As of September 2024, I am a senior researcher at the University of Lausanne in the FNS Sinergia project ‘Capturing the Present in Northwestern Europe (1348-1648): a Cultural History of Present before the Age of Presentism’, which I co-developed. My focus within the project is on the ‘everyday experience’ of the present in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Low Countries, with a focus on the rhythms and practices of early modern Netherlandish artists and the representation of rest, rien-faire, contemplation in the visual arts of that period and region.