Hanna te Velde

PhD Researcher

Hanna te Velde is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social History and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Here she is writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of prof.dr. Ulbe Bosma and dr. Matthias van Rossum. In 2020 she graduated cum laude from the research master Colonial and Global History at Leiden University.

In her PhD project ‘Colonial Girl Power’, funded by the Professor van Winter Fonds, Hanna studies the socio-economic position of women in the early modern Dutch empire. By using court cases from the newly digitized archives of the VOC and WIC, she will study the many, various ways in which women tried to improve their position – unfree as well as free women, with European and non-European backgrounds. The project focusses on four case studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Batavia, Cochin, Paramaribo and Willemstad.

A photograph of Hanna te Velde
Photo by Monique Kooijmans