In this book, Henk van Rinsum provides an in-depth description of the colonial past of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, from its foundation in 1636. He describes the development of (scientific) knowledge and knowledge transfer about and in the Dutch colonies, especially in the Dutch East Indies. The central theme of his book is the idea of Western superiority – the assumption that we are ‘developed’ and therefore modern, while those in the colonies are ‘not (yet) developed’ an...

Below the famously flat surface of the Netherlands lies a fascinating world of buried mountains and valleys, which can only be unraveled with drillings, geophysical techniques and geological understanding.

Thorough exploration for hydrocarbons, groundwater and minerals produced a wealth of data and knowledge about the Dutch subsurface and its various uses. The second edition of this book, originally published in 2007, provides access to that wealth with a thoroughly revised and updated descri...

This book provides a thorough revision of the image of the public church under the Dutch Republic after the Peace of Westphalia and before the onset of the ‘high Enlightenment’. Traditional church history considers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a period of decline. Yet this was the high tide of Dutch expansion when Dutch society was extremely rich. In its five universities and its highly literate population internationally acknowledged scholarship, arts and sciences flowered. D...

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes Vermeer were peers, extremely curious and grew up in the bustling Delft of the seventeenth century. Nowadays, they are world famous.

Both explored and created new worlds. Van Leeuwenhoek discovered the miraculous micro-life with his self-built microscopes, Vermeer played with light and painted masterpieces such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring and View of Delft.

What if…they knew each other? Did they know each other? Oh yes, they could have!

What if th...

How will businesses use quantum technology in the future? What problems will a quantum computer solve? How long will it take before these devices become commercially relevant?

With the first generation of quantum computers on the horizon, understanding their impact is more relevant than ever. Luckily, you don’t need a physics degree to understand the functionality of these computers – just like you don’t need to know how a transistor works to excel in conventional it.

This book is the...

When the Allied Forces arrived in the Netherlands after Operation Market Garden, the country’s long-awaited liberation from National Socialist occupation finally came in the summer of 1945. With freedom reclaimed, a wave of joy and hope swept through the nation, finding its most powerful expression in the stirring liberation songs that resonated across the land. These songs, an evocative transatlantic soundtrack of freedom, captured the spirit of the time through music, lyrics, and dance, c...

What do scholars do when they talk about virtues (impartiality, accuracy) or vices (dogmatism, prejudice)? Against the common view that such high-minded talk is largely irrelevant to actual scholarly practice, this volume proposes to treat it as a practice in its own right.

Drawing on case studies from the nineteenth-century humanities (with occasional forays into physics, chemistry, and medicine), Paul shows that notions of virtue and vice were an evaluative discourse used across the academi...

Qualitative analysis resembles a puzzle; you are confronted with a heap of data and you find yourself wondering: what should I do next? Ideally, you have already started the analysis before the amount of data becomes overwhelming. However, realistically, qualitative research inevitably generates a large amount of data that requires thorough organization, interpretation, combination and manipulation.

A Companion to Qualitative Analysis introduces the concept of Thick analysis, a triangulation ...

In Multispecies Dialogues Eva Meijer develops a new understanding of the concept ‘dialogue’, which includes embodied, material and spatial interaction. Meijer does not do this alone: each chapter of the book is devoted to a dialogue, or set of dialogues – with street dog Olli, a community of former lab mice, amphibian neighbours, the North Sea, and many other beings. Taking multispecies dialogues seriously is a way to do justice to more-than-human agency and to become more worldly in a ...

The yearbook offers an international, interdisciplinary, innovative platform for scholarly research in the field of contextual Biblical interpretation. Embracing contextuality as a catalyst for interpretation, the Yearbook is dedicated to fostering interpretations of Biblical texts.