Raised in a village on the Veluwe, I nevertheless received my BA and MA degrees (Utrecht University, cum laude) in 2013 and 2018. I graduated on land conflict and development of citizenship in the late nineteenth century among Russian peasant colonists in Bashkiria, a border region in the southern Urals. Before I focused on Russia, I worked on East and Southeast Asia, especially the Dutch East Indies. That history will always be a part of me.

You could say that I am interested in the countryside in the broadest sense of the word. I find it fascinating how matters like imperialism and colonialism, economic and administrative integration and modernization found their expression in agrarian changes. Agriculture and life in the countryside are no neutral given, after all, but are through and through political. I study the changing political system in the Russian empire after 1861 by looking at the so-called land question, also known as the ‘agrarian question’ or ‘peasant question’, as an arena in which all kinds of people and interests clashed and coalesced. This I do in the Baltic province of Livland and Bashkiria’s central province of Ufa.

Apart from my study of politics in Russia’s imperial past, I also write or talk about the (changing) political system of Putin’s Russia.