Dr. Martine van Ittersum was appointed honorary fellow at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in August 2011.

Together with Prof. Henk Nellen she wrote a ‘Digital Grotius’ research infrastructure grant application, aimed at digitizing the working papers of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645).   The major project partners include ESHCC, Huygens ING, the Dutch National Archives and the Peace Palace Library.  The application was submitted to Nederlands Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) in August 2011.

Approximately 10,000 folios of Grotius’ working papers have survived in a dozen libraries and archives in The Netherlands and Sweden.  The documents consist of newsletters, reading notes, memoranda, petitions, outlines and (draft) treatises.  They offer a unique insight into the process of knowledge production in the seventeenth century, particularly Grotius’ working methods.   How did he select his sources, for example?  What were his criteria in preparing a treatise for printed publication?  What did he change or leave out altogether?  Provided we get the required funding, ‘Digital Grotius’ will supply the tools necessary to answer these and many other research questions.  The project will digitize all the extant documents originating in Grotius’ personal archive and bring these materials together in a state-of-the-art virtual research environment, to be made publicly available on the Peace Palace Library website.   The virtual research environment will allow researchers around the world to annotate and transcribe documents on-line and to create links with relevant electronic text editions, including The Correspondence of Hugo Grotius ().

Dr. Van Ittersum is the ‘Erasmus Lecturer in the History and Civilization of The Netherlands and Flanders’  at Harvard University in autumn 2011.  She will be a Visiting Scholar in the History Department at Harvard in spring 2012.  She has worked as ‘Lecturer in European History’ at the University of Dundee in Scotland since 2003.  For more information, please click here: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/history/staff/vanittersum/