Researcher

Elisabeth Heijmans

Research Expertise:Elisabeth Heijmans is an economic and social historian specialized in French and Dutch early modern overseas expansions. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the university of Antwerp in the Center for Urban History. She obtained her PhD at Leiden university in 2018 on early modern French empire and overseas companies with a particular emphasis on the role trans-imperial and cross-cultural interactions as well as private interests. Her work challenged the centralized and linear vision of the French early modern expansion. After her PhD, she worked a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden university on the governance of diversity in the early modern Dutch empire. Her current research focuses on French early modern merchants’ expectation of the future and the influence of the enlightenment on their future thinking and actions.

Research techniques:I use the program Transkribus creating model to transcribe automatically handwritten sources (HTR recognition)