Biography
I completed my undergraduate studies in theology and cultural anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. My undergraduate work focused, among others, on the disciplinary connections between anthropology and theology. I continued my graduate studies at the University of Amsterdam, completing the Research Master Social Sciences (RMSS) including 5 months of fieldwork on the ethical formations of Catholic students and scholars in the Netherlands. During my studies I have been involved in a number of academic projects including a team-ethnography and the development of an online qualitative research tool. After graduating from my master's and before coming to Cambridge, I set up and participated in various social projects in and around Amsterdam. For my PhD, I return to themes explored in my earlier work: theology, ethical formations and intellectual developments.
Research
I am interested in intellectual engagements with religious traditions. In particular, I am interested in how students and scholars at theology faculties in modern universities engage with the intellectual side of religion in a setting marked by secular ways of thinking. I argue that their intellectual engagements are intertwined with their religious and moral developments and that they therefore cannot be understood as being opposed in the same sense that science and religion have often been cast as opposite forces. Rather, a fine-grained description and analysis is needed to identify the various ways religious students and scholars shape their intellectual engagements with religious traditions. This project aims to ethnographically research the way students and scholars develop intellectually and morally and how critical reflection on the one hand and traditional convictions on the other hand are valued at a Christian theology faculty in the Netherlands. It brings together methods and insights from anthropology of ethics, the study of institutions, education studies and theology.
