Author: René van Weeren

In the 3rd round of the NWO Open Competition SSH XS, NWO has granted an XS Grant to Posthumus fellow and former Posthumus research network coordinator Dr Corinne Boter for her research proposal, entitled ‘Technological change and gender inequality: A comparison between a Dutch and an Italian textile company, 1870-1920’.

The technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution profoundly changed work organization, with the textile industry leading the way. New technology also affected the extent of gendered occupational segregation and the gender wage gap. However, as the mechanisms behind this are not yet fully understood (as historians commonly look at macro-level developments), this project studies company-level developments. It employs comparative methods to investigate to what extent similar technological advancements in textile companies in different cultural contexts (the Netherlands and Italy), had similar or different effects on gender relations. This will elucidate the circumstances under which technology could improve or exacerbate gender inequality.

The Posthumus staff congratulates Corinne with this award.

In March 2025 Module 2 of the Online Lecture Series ‘An Introduction to Inequalities in Health using Historical Causes of Death’ will start. This online lecture series is scheduled as part of the COST Project CA22116 – The Great Leapand is organised in co-operation with the N.W. Posthumus Institute. It is targeted at students and scholars at all levels interested in exploring major issues related to health inequalities from a historical point of view. There are four modules, each module comprises several lectures. Module 2 will address sources and databases. Module 3 will address methods and analyses (expected September 2025 – June 2026). Depending on the feedback from participants, modules are repeated or new modules are added to the online lecture series. For each module it will be possible to earn 1 EC.

Module 2: Database Management

Description

This module is targeted at students and scholars at all levels interested in exploring (historical) database management related to health inequalities. Participants will gain detailed knowledge from six expertly-led lectures on various key topics.

General Learning objectives

Upon completion of the online modules, students are able to:

• understand how different disciplines approach the study of health inequalities;
• outline some of the major debates in the study of health inequalities;
• explain and reflect upon important determinants of inequality in health and how they relate to broader processes of change in the period 1800-2024;
• reflect on one specific article dealing with inequality in health and present it to an interdisciplinary group of scholars/peers.

Program

7 March 2025 – Tiziana Margaria (University of Limerick)
Best practices for data management

21 March 2025 – TBA
Using automatic transcription for processing sources

4 April 2025 – Angelique Janssens (Radboud University) and Isabelle Devos (Ghent University)
The creation of cause of death databases

25 April 2025 – TBA
Coding historical causes of death data with Large Language Models

16 May 2025 – Alice Reid  (University of Cambridge) / Mayra Murkens (University of Groningen)
Historical International Classification for Diseases

23 May 2025 – Michail Raftakis (University of Bologna), Elena Crinela Holom (Babeș-Bolyai University), Grażyna Liczbińska (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań)
Cause of death sources around the world

30 May 2025 – Hannaliis Jaadla (University of Cambridge)
Measures of inequality and SES differences in mortality

ECs and Registration

The lecture series is open to everyone, but PhD students who attend all six sessions and present a reflection on a specific article from the lecture series during a final meeting will be entitled to earn 1 EC (European Credits) and receive an official certificate. As co-organiser, the N.W. Posthumus Institute, Research School for Economic and Social History, currently hosted by Utrecht University will issue these official certificates to participants who have successfully participated. Please register via the button below if you would like to follow the lecture series and receive the certificate with 1 ECTS.

Registration deadline was until 28 February 2025.

FULL INFO

Please note that recordings of module 1 are still available via this page (external link).

Recently, Liesbeth Rosen Jacobson concluded her valuable work as a coordinator of our Research Network ‘Inclusion, Exclusion, and Mobility’. We thank Liesbeth very much for her contribution over the past years!

We are happy to announce we have found a suitable successor in the person of Dr Swantje Falcke. Swantje Falcke is an Assistant Professor in Economic and Social History at Utrecht University specialised in the field of migrant integration and naturalization. Currently, Swantje is involved in a project looking at the effectiveness of integration policies for refugees’ labor market integration in the Netherlands from a long-term perspective. Next to these projects, Swantje as migration scholar with an interdisciplinary profile is currently developing a new research line analyzing the impact of environmental change on migration in a long-term perspective.

We welcome Swantje who will coordinate the Research Network ‘Inclusion, Exclusion, and Mobility’ in cooperation with Dr Bart Lambert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).

Over the past years, Professor Pepijn Brandon, together with Dr Wout Saelens, coordinated the Research Network ‘Economy and Society of the Pre-industrial Low Countries in Comparative Perspective’ of the N.W. Posthumus Institute. Because of his obligations at VU Amsterdam and his new function at BMHN / KNHG, Pepijn has decided to hand over his tasks as network coordinator.

We are pleased to announce he has found Dr Janna Coomans to take his place as of January 2025 and join Wout Saelens as Network Coordinator.  Janna is Assistant Professor at the department of Medieval History. Her research focuses on social history and public health in premodern cities. Her dissertation (cum laude) was published in 2021 as Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge University Press). Between 2018-2021, she was a post doctoral researcher in the ERC-project ‘Healthscaping Urban Europe’. She currently works on the VENI (Dutch Research Council) project ‘Inflammable cities: how fire risks transformed the Low Countries, 1250-1600’.

The Centro de Investigación Interuniversitario das Paisaxes Atlánticas Culturais – Interuniversity Research Centre for Atlantic Cultural Landscapes (CISPAC) is launching a call to support applications for the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025, with estimated publication and submission dates in April and September 2025, respectively. CISPAC is a new generation inter-university research center in social and human sciences that is part of the Galician University System (SUG). Its mission is to investigate in order to provide systemic answers to contemporary challenges on the territory, through a transdisciplinary scientific confluence, intertwined with the whole of citizenship, to generate knowledge, innovation and change. At CISPAC, researchers aspire to research and promote solutions related to socioeconomic, cultural and environmental transformations that are reflected in the landscape, through research, to generate knowledge, and transfer, to generate action. We seek sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Candidates must prepare a research proposal to be carried out during the fellowship within the framework of one of the 5 research fields included in CISPAC’s scientific agenda, as well as the three strategic axes.

FULL INFO (PDF)