News

Puck Rouffaer is the winner of the Volkskrant-IISG thesis prize with her thesis 'Between liberation and social control in sexological practice. Coen van Emde Boas' approach to homosexuality and 'transsexism', 1950-1980'.

With the generous support of Farman-Farmaian Family, the IISH launches a new fellowship programme named the Prince Dr Sabbar Farman-Farmaian Fellowships for scholars who wish to use its collections for the study of social and economic history of 18-20 century of Iran, whether from a regional, national, or comparative and transnational perspective.

Lily Knibbeler has been appointed director of the International Institute of Social History, effective May 2026. Knibbeler is an historian with a long track record at the KB, National Library of the Netherlands, where she served as director general for the past ten years. She will succeed Leo Lucassen, who is retiring.

We have received news of the passing of our former staff member, Tristan Haan. As is often the case with IISG employees, Tristan did not fall far from the tree: his father, Bart, was active with the Alarmists in the late 1920s. This group was named after the Ukrainian anarchist group Nabat, which means 'alarm'. In the Netherlands, they belonged to the extreme left wing of anarchism. 

In the new project Chains of the Past: Open Infrastructure for the Global History of Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade, the Institute of Social History (IISG), Radboud University and the KITLV are collaborating with a large number of genealogical and heritage organisations to start building an online infrastructure that will make archives on the history of Dutch Atlantic and Asian slavery searchable.

Do the keys to understanding today's complex world lie in the past? TSEG (Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History) challenges young researchers to demonstrate whether economic and social history can contribute to solving current social issues, and if so, how.

The Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA) project at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam proudly announces:

• The second version of the ESTA Database, now containing about 5,300 voyages that refer to at least 440,000 enslaved individuals who were forcibly transported across the wider Indian Ocean World. Six new datasets have been added, focusing on China, the Mascarenes, Mozambique, and East India.

Hoe kunnen we gendergelijkheid bevorderen, beginnend bij de ICT- en schoonmaaksector? Die vraag staat centraal bij het project Vrouwen Vooruit met Netwerk V, een samenwerking tussen vakbond FNV en IISG, die loopt tot eind 2027. 

Our colleague Touraj Atabaki won a prestigious prize for his latest book Toiling for Oil: A Social History of Petroleum in Iran. He was awarded one of the annual prizes to the best scholarly work in Middle Eastern Studies by the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize. 

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, European slave traders forcibly and violently shipped more than 12.5 million men, women and children from the coast of West Africa to North and South America. Who invested in this slave trade, in Europe and beyond? How did they influence European economy, politics and culture? Historian Pepijn Brandon, together with three other researchers has received a Synergy Grant of 10 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) to investigate these questions in the TASTADE project (The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Development of Europe).

Code geel met harde windstoten – voor de open dag op het IISG maakte het niets uit. Een overweldigend aantal geïnteresseerden – tussen de 500 en 600 mensen - kwam ons instituut bezoeken voor een rondleiding, een creatieve workshop of de tentoonstelling met archiefmateriaal dat niet vaak wordt getoond.  

Vrijdag 19 september werd de database Early Modern Dutch Colonial Court Records op het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG) gepresenteerd en publiek toegankelijk gemaakt.