News

A coalition of Amsterdam based Archives, Museums and Historical institutes* with the generous support of the Insinger Foundation has taken the initiative for a five-year programme that offers three three-month long fellowships per year for curators, archivists and historians in the field of slavery history.

Jaap Kloosterman spent most of his working life at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, serving as a researcher, librarian, and board member before becoming director from 1993 to 2008 – the longest tenure since the institute’s founder, Nicolaas Posthumus. Jaap Kloosterman was a guardian of collections and a friend to collectors. He remained involved with the IISH until the very end.

How can we promote gender equality, starting with the ICT and cleaning sectors? This question is at the heart of the ‘Women Forward with Netwerk V’ project, a collaboration between the FNV trade union and the IISG, which will run until the end of 2027.

Ruby Khan worked at the IISH for 25 years in various departments. She started in the secretariat and, in addition to reception duties, also worked in the collections processing department, where her knowledge of Urdu was invaluable.

On 15 and 16 January 2027, the international conference ‘Households as Coercive Labour Regimes II’ will be jointly organised by the IISH in collaboration with Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) of the University of Bonn. Organisers of this event are Stephan Conermann (BCDSS) and Posthumus fellows Ulbe Bosma and Gijs Kessler (both IISH).

‘All the groceries, but not a fig for young workers’, read a banner during the occupation of Ahold’s headquarters in 1981. ‘For a long time, young workers were not taken seriously, but they managed to put themselves on the map’, says historian Rosa Kösters.

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.