Dr. Esther Baakman

I am a historian of early modern colonial history and the history of news My research deals with the intersection of both fields focusing on colonial news in the periodical press, colonial citizenship, and the development of various discourses of slavery in early modern Europe. My current book project, based on my dissertation and provisionally entitled Atlantic Adivces: Representing the Americas in the Dutch Periodical Press, explores how the periodical press consistently covered distant but urgent transatlantic conflicts and developments using the constant flow of communications in the Atlantic world. It reveals how the weekly periodicity of the press brought stories of colonialism and slavery into the lives of European citizens. Alongside my research, I have been teaching in early modern and modern history at Leiden University, and Radboud University Nijmegen.

• Esther Baakman  (2023). ‘From Valuable Merchandise to Violent Rebels : Depicting Enslaved Africans in the Dutch Periodical Press in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.' BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.51769/bmgn-lchr.12793

• Esther Baakman & Michiel van Groesen, ‘Kranten in de Gouden Eeuw’, in: Huub Wijfjes & Frank Harbers (eds.) De krant. Een cultuurgeschiedenis. (Amsterdam 2019) 21-45.

• Esther Baakman, ‘“Their Power has been Broken, the Danger has Passed”. Dutch Newspaper Coverage of the Berbice Slave Revolt, 1763’, Early Modern Low Countries 2/1 (2018) 45-67.