Introducing: Sophie Rose
Sophie Rose recently joined the Institute for History as a postdoctoral researcher in her project 'Unsettled Minds: Madness, normativity, and practices of care in the world of the Dutch East India Company' funded by the Ammodo Science Fellowship. Below, she introduces herself.
It feels a bit like cheating to introduce myself on the institute news page, as I may be ‘old news’ to some of the long-standing members, having done my PhD here from 2017 to 2022. After three years in Germany I am back, to a Leiden that feels at once familiar and brand new, with new students, old and new colleagues, and surprising new rooms around the Huizinga. My old office having been transformed into a Digital Lab (which I am very excited to explore), I am now based on the north-east corner of the second floor, with Intigam Mamedov and Tamsin Prideaux. Feel free to stop by and say hi! I am often there on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
For my PhD, I worked on the ‘Resilient Diversity’ project with Cátia Antunes and Karwan Fatah-Black (my supervisors) as well as Elisabeth Heijmans and colleagues at the IISH in Amsterdam, with whom we created a database of early modern Dutch colonial court records that can be explored here. My dissertation, which I defended in April 2023, dealt with norms and conflicts around marriage, sex, and family life in the eighteenth-century Dutch overseas empire. I am proud to share that my book 'Intimacy and social (dis)order in Dutch colonial expansion', which came out of this project, is out now in Open Access with Brill.
After my PhD, I started a postdoctoral fellowship as part of an interdisciplinary research group centered on the theme of ‘ambiguity’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen, focusing on the ambiguity of belonging and alien legislation in revolutionary-era Curaçao and the Caribbean. In 2023, this project branched out to the University of Tübingen, where I worked for the remainder of my postdoc, collaborating closely with the ERC-project ‘Atlantic Exiles’.
My new project in Leiden, titled 'Unsettled Minds: Madness, normativity, and practices of care in the world of the Dutch East India Company', is funded by an Ammodo Science Fellowship. Although I officially started in October 2025, I welcomed a baby girl into the world in November, and so my research really started in earnest in February 2026. Over the next two and a half years, I will try to answer the question what it meant to be ‘normal’ in a diverse and violently hierarchical colonial world, by exploring the VOC-world’s response to behaviors and mental states it considered abnormal, whether they were criminalized, medicalized, or otherwise pathologized. I look forward to discussing my work with some of you and learning from the wealth of expertise in fields such as colonial history, the history of medicine, and disability studies among the colleagues here.