University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (UNIAM)
Website: www.english.uva.nl/start.cfm
A modern university with a rich history, the University of Amsterdam (UNIAM) traces its roots back to 1632, when the Golden Age school Athenaeum Illustre was established to train students in trade and philosophy. Today, with more than 30,000 students, 5,000 staff and 250 study programmes (Bachelor’s and Master’s), many of which are taught in English, and a budget of more than 600 million euros, it is one of the largest comprehensive universities in Europe. It is a member of the League of European Research Universities and also maintains intensive contact with other leading research universities around the world.
Guy Geltner is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. Mainly focused on Western Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, my primary interests lie in the shifting boundaries of social order and disorder and the ways in which individuals, societies, and polities have sought to create, protect, and at times ignore them. Much of my work is based on records excavated from Italian city-state archives, which means that many of the questions I deal with concern an urban context. Both before and after the publication of my first book, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (2008), I have had a strong interest in the history, anthropology, and sociology of punishment, which led me to challenge some prevalent distinctions between modern and pre-modern practices. My most recent exploration in this field concerns the original creation of female wards in pre-modern prisons, and what that can tell us about the relations between gender, deviance, and punishment. My second monograph, The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance (2012), is a study of opposition to the medieval mendicant orders and its role in mendicant memory. It explores resistance to friars in literature, church doctrine, civic law, and social action, and questions the traditional parallels drawn between the brethren's negative reception and other forms of coeval and later anticlericalism. Two further interests I am pursuing are the history of pre-modern public health, especially urban preventative measures, and the history of corruption in both civic and ecclesiastical milieus. Both topics are new to me as research fields, but I have begun publishing on the former, while the latter topic will be developed in the context of an FP7 project on anti-corruption funded by the European Commission.
André Vitória is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. My research is part of the FP7 project on the history of anti-corruption and looks into the measures taken by public authorities in Portugal (both secular and ecclesiastical) to restrain administrative, judicial, and political corruption, from the middle of the thirteenth century until the end of the fifteenth century. I am particularly interested in comparing developments in medieval Portugal with similar efforts by the Church and by secular authorities in the kingdoms of Castile, France, and England to deal with corrupt practices.I graduated in 2006 with a BA in History from the University of Porto and concluded my Ph.D. at the same university in 2013. My doctoral research has focused on legal culture in Portugal from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, especially the impact of the medieval Romano-canonical ius commune on the administration of justice, litigation, and the relationship between different jurisdictions and political powers. The contribution of legal culture to the political relations between Church and Crown in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains a very great interest of mine.
James Kennedy is professor of Dutch history since the Middle Ages at the University van Amsterdam, where he has worked since 2007. By origins an American, Kennedy is specialized in postwar history, having written books on the cultural changes of the 1960s, on euthanasia policy and the political and social role of religious institutions in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written and spoken widely on the cultural habitus of Dutch politics and administration. He has coordinated a research project that examined corruption scandals in Dutch history from 1650 to 1950, with an eye to how these scandals both reflected and facilitated changes in public values.
Ronald Kroeze is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Amsterdam and member of the ANTICORRP research team. His research concerns the modern history of corruption and anticorruption in Western Europe, mainly analysed from the perspective what a historical and contextual approach to scandals and debates about corruption tells us about changing public morals, administrative norms, ideological dominance and political contest. In 2012 he finished his PhD and in 2013 his thesis was published: Een kwestie van politieke moraliteit. Politieke corruptieschandalen en goed bestuur in Nederland, 1848-1940 (A question of political morality. Political corruption scandals and good government in the Netherlands, 1848-1940). On this subject he also published in the Journal of Modern European History, special issue Corruption and the Rise of Modern Politics (2013, 11 (1)). Kroeze is also interested in the history of modern management and the use of history by business (leaders), on which he wrote (together with Dr. S.J. Keulen) in BMGN/ Low Countries Historical Review (2012, 127 (2), 97-112), Management & Organizational History (2012, 7(2), 171-189 and Business History (2013, 55(1), 1-23). In 2008 he wrote a book (together with Dr. S.J. Keulen and drs. M. Hannemann) on historical border places in Eastern Europe: Vals plat in de Oeral. De zoektocht naar de oostgrens van Europa (False flat in the Urals. The search for the Eastern border of Europe). Kroeze is also an assistant professor in History at VU University Amsterdam. He was a visiting scholar at Humboldt University Berlin (July-October 2014) and attended summer school at the London School of Economics, Helsinky University and Viadrina University Frankfurt (Oder). He holds a Master degree in History (cum laude) (2007), a BA in History (2004) and a BA in International Relations (2006) from Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Maaike van Berkel is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on state administration, communication and urban life in the medieval Middle Eastern world. Her project within ANTICORRP focuses on continuities and changes in both the theory on good governance and the practice of anti-corruption measures of two central and important Middle Eastern empires, the ʿAbbāsid (8th-10th centuries) and Mamlūk (13-15th centuries) empires.
