Dr Arthur der Weduwen

Dr Arthur der Weduwen

USTC Project Manager & Lecturer

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2911
Email
adw7@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

I am a Lecturer in Modern History and Co-Director and Project Manager of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project. I am a historian of early modern Europe (c. 1500-1800) with interdisciplinary expertise in the history of communication, print culture, politics and law. I research and publish on the history of Europe comparatively and several regions specifically (Low Countries, Scandinavia, Britain). 

The first subject of my research career was the history of newspapers, which resulted in the publication of the first complete bibliography of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish newspapers (Brill, 2017), as well as two co-authored studies on the invention and development of newspaper advertising (both Brill, 2020). I have also worked extensively on the history of early modern printing, the book trade and book collecting, producing two co-authored public-facing monographs on the book trade of the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019) and a global history of libraries (Profile, 2021).

In 2023 I published State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age, partially based on the PhD thesis that I defended at St Andrews in 2018. This work describes the political communication practices of the authorities in the early modern Netherlands: the manner in which government sought to inform its citizens, publicise its laws, and engage publicly in quarrels with political opponents.

In the same year I secured funding through an ERC Starting Grant/UKRI Frontier Research Grant that allowed me to expand my research on state communication by embarking on a comparative European study of the communication of law. The COMLAWEU project runs from 2024 to 2028, and involves three postdoctoral scholars and three PhD students. Each member of the team works on a case study (Italy, France, Scandinavia and the Baltic, Poland-Lithuania, the Habsburg lands, the Dutch Republic), which will allow us, as a research team, to come to a comprehensive understanding of the strategies that European authorities used to communicate with their inhabitants.

In my previous research, I have also undertaken work as part of my British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-2023) on the writing and publishing of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focussing as a case study on the canonisation of events in the Dutch Disaster Year (1672) and the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678). This has in part resulted in a study and modern edition of the first prominent Dutch historical school book, the Franse Tirannie (printed in over 50 editions between 1674 and the end of the eighteenth century).

My latest major publication is The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada (Princeton UP, 2026), a revisionist history that places the Dutch Republic and Prince William III of Orange at the centre of the narrative of the so-called 'Glorious Revolution'.

I have published six co-edited volumes on themes in the history of the book and print culture, specifically on book catalogues, the Reformation and the book, the early modern book trade, the book world of the early Enlightenment, early modern publishers, and multilingual print culture.

I have been a visiting fellow at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Leiden, the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and the University of Padua.

I am an editor-in-chief of Brill's The Library of the Written Word - Handpress monograph series, and a member of the editorial board of the Dutch Yearbook for Book History and the journal Library & Information History. I also serve as an international advisory board member for the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge.

At St Andrews I teach at undergraduate and postgraduate levels on the history of the book, printing and public opinion, and the Dutch Republic. I welcome enquiries for postgraduate research supervision.

PhD supervision

  • Chloe Akers-Brewer
  • Saba Alkuwari
  • Zachary Brookman
  • Emma Caster
  • Zina Gharakhani
  • Giovanni Petrocelli
  • Pawel Pietrowcew
  • Bryony Pillath
  • Adyan Sharda
  • Demi vann Breukelen
  • Mhairi Winfield
  • Stanislas Zagun
  • Alexa Zildjian

Selected publications

 

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