Dr Karen Hollewand (postdoc October 2018 – March 2022)

Karen Hollewand is a postdoc in the SKILLNET project and concentrates on the conceptual history of the ideal of sharing knowledge in the Republic of Letters. She received a BA and MA in History from the University of Utrecht and studied the banishment of rebel humanist Hadriaan Beverland during her DPhil at the University of Oxford. After completing her DPhil in 2016, she has completed her book on Beverland (The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, which will be published by Brill this year), started working on a translation of Beverland’s main work De Peccato Originali with dr Floris Verhaart, and continued her studies into sex and science in early modern Europe. In the SKILLNET project, Karen studies the language used by early modern scholars when talking about the ideal of sharing knowledge, creating a chronological and semantic map of the main ethical notions which held the Republic of Letters together and finding whether these notions changed over time or differed according to, for example, region, language, religion, and gender.