Merit Hondelink

• Doctoral defence: 24 September 2026 at 11 a.m.
• RUG: Academiegebouw Groningen
• Supervisors: Daan Raemaekers (RUG), Bruno Blondé (UAntwerpen) and Mans Schepers (RUG)
• ​Confirm your attendance by email before 18 september.​
• ​Read Merit's article on the faculty blog Bladspiegel (English version at the bottom)​

Abstract

Dietary habits of the past are a tough nut to crack. This dissteration looks into the consumption of plant-based foods in early modern Dutch cities (1500–1850) using a multidisciplinary approach that combines archaeobotanical and historical research. Data from cesspit finds, cookbooks, a herbarium, kitchen accounts, and experimental archaeobotanical research are integrated to reconstruct plant-based food consumption.

Two questions are central to the dissertation: 1) which plant-based foods were consumed regularly, and 2) how can culinary archaeobotanical and historical sources best be integrated?

The research shows that the plant-based diet of early modern Dutch citizens was characterised primarily by continuity. Although food trends, local availability and the diversity of (exotic) ingredients changed, the fundamental composition of the daily diet appears to have remained stable.

At the same time, it appears that neither source alone can provide a complete reconstruction of past food consumption. Archaeobotanical remains show what was actually prepared, consumed, and discarded by a household, but the specific dishes and their composition remain unknown. Historical sources reveal what was available, prescribed, purchased, or culturally valued, but say less about the prevalence and popularity, nor the consumer.

By systematically combining both perspectives, a more nuanced picture emerges of daily consumption, local variation, and global imports. Further methodological innovation, such as plant tissue analysis, analysis of volatile organic compounds and ‘learning by doing’, offers opportunities to further refine future reconstructions. Just as with a good meal, it is all about the thoughtful combination of the ingredients.

An Dufraing

• Doctoral defence: 5 October 2026 at 5 p.m.
• UAntwerpen Stadscampus, Hof van Liere: Prentenkabinet
• Supervisor: Geert Van Eekert
• Confirm your attendance through an.dufraing@uantwerpen.be​

Abstract

This dissertation asks why Hannah Arendt’s critique of the modern concept of History still matters at a moment when belief in progress has largely lost its credibility. Its central claim is that modern History survives today less as an explicit doctrine than as a conceptual grammar: a set of inherited assumptions through which events are explained as developments, crises are managed as systemic processes, and the past is rendered intelligible without requiring a response from those who inherit it.

The first part reconstructs how this historical grammar displaces the political reality of human affairs through four key elements: methodologies of mistrust that privilege hidden processes over appearances; abstract categories that replace individual actors with collective subjects; an ideal of objectivity that favours detachment over judgment; and process-thinking that transforms contingency into historical necessity. Through an examination of the concept of crisis and of contemporary historical theory, the dissertation further asks how these assumptions continue to shape attempts to understand historical time, political crisis, and the unprecedented.

The second part turns to remembrance as a relation to the past that this historical grammar tends to obscure. Rather than the unaltered preservation of past experience, remembrance is reconstructed as a transformative practice through which what has happened becomes meaningful, shareable, and capable of claiming a place in the common world. It unfolds across an inner dimension of recollection, imagination, and judgment, and an outer dimension of articulation, testimony, listening, and reception. Crucially, these dimensions are mutually dependent: the inner work of remembrance acquires worldly reality through articulation and reception, while its public appearance depends in turn on the recollective, imaginative, and judgmental activity through which the past is made present. In dialogue with memory studies, this dissertation shows that remembrance depends both on fidelity to what has appeared and on shared spaces in which its significance can be disclosed, contested, and sustained. Remembrance thereby emerges as a public practice through which witnesses, listeners, and communities maintain a shared reality.

This dissertation ultimately argues that the past remains politically significant only where it can still interrupt the present, call for judgment, and receive a response. It shows how remembrance can keep the world responsive to what has happened without reducing the past to either historical process or frozen record.