Hannelore Braeken PhD candidate

Hannelore Braeken is a PhD candidate in the Economic and Social History section at Leiden University. She conducts doctoral research into the history of loneliness as experienced by people with mild intellectual disabilities, under the supervision of Paul van Trigt, Marlou Schrover and Hester van de Bovenkamp. Hannelore studied history at KU Leuven and the University of Cádiz, and obtained her master's degree in 2024 with a dissertation on Belgium's response to the Thalidomide scandal (1959-2009).

Bianca Angelien Claveria PhD candidate

Bianca Angelien Aban Claveria is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History, and a member of Dr. Fenneke Sysling's ERC Starting Grant project COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia. She is also an editor of Shells and Pebbles, a history of science blog. Her research project broadly covers the histories of tuberculosis and leprosy in American colonial Philippines (early 20th century), with particular focus on biomedical experiments, physician-patient encounters, and medical ethics.

Mieneke te Hennepe is a medical historian and curator of medical collections at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave. In November 2025 she was appointed professor by special appointment of Medical History at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). Her work explores how medical heritage can be made meaningful for students, patients, healthcare professionals, and the wider public. She is particularly interested in the role of historical objects in public engagement, biomedical education, and the well-being of patients and medical practitioners. By bridging university and museum contexts, Te Hennepe seeks to activate historical collections as platforms for dialogue on the ethics and future of modern healthcare.

Pancras Hogendoorn

I work at LUCAS as a professor of Medicine, History and Art. I have a (bio-)medical background as a pathologist, which means (clinically) specialised in mechanisms, macroscopy and microscopy of disease. I combine this background with a keen interest in the history of medicine and art. The structure and function of the human body and of diseases over the ages have been depicted in drawings, prints, and sculptures (models). They reflect the knowledge at the time they were produced, but are also interesting as new techniques sometimes had to be invented in order to visualise the biomedical points of interest. The Leiden library has a vast collection of, till now, not well-studied medical prints and drawings; the Boerhaave museum of objects and the Anatomical museum at LUMC have specimens collected over centuries. The latter also brings moral discussions about collecting medical specimens. The interphases of cultures are of particular interest in medicine. In that respect, I work on projects with Indonesia and Japan, studying the influence of Eastern medical knowledge on the West and vice versa and the way this knowledge is transferred by visual material.

Maaike Hommes University lecturer

Maaike Hommes (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Cultural Analysis and Film and Visual Culture at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She has a broad interest in relationality and critical embodiment. Previous research has been on unexplained illness, and coined the concept Nervous Routes, to identify the routes that explanations for illness take in the absence of a clear biomedical marker for disease experienced by the patient. Research/teaching interests include Crip/Queer Theory, Disability Justice, Accessible Pedagogy, Reproductive Justice, Medical Violence, Materialist Feminism, and gender studies in general. Popular (non-academic) writing in Dutch has appeared in De Nederlandse Boekengids and De Groene Amsterdammer.

Victoria Nyst Associate professor

Victoria Nyst is associate professor and director of the HANDS!Lab for Sign Languages and Gesture Studies at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics. Her research focuses on sign languages and Deaf studies around the world, with a special focus on Africa, Europe, and recently Brazil. She currently leads the project Through the Hands of Signers on the history of signing, deaf communities, and perspectives on deafness and deaf people in various parts of the world.

Kaya Peerdeman Assistant professor

Kaya Peerdeman works as an assistant professor at the Health, Medical and Neuropsychology at Leiden University, within the Center for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies Leiden, and within the theme 'Mental Illness’ of the Sector Plan for the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Kaya Peerdeman' research specifically focuses on how expectations shape health, for example through examining placebo and nocebo effects (i.e., beneficial and adverse treatment outcomes not attributable to active treatment components, respectively). She also has a particular interest in violated expectations and uncertainty. She examines how they impact health outcomes like pain and other symptoms (e.g., itch, stress) and what biopsychosocial factors are involved (e.g., anxiety, doctor-patient communication). Central in her work are mechanistic studies bridging fundamental and applied research. She works to translate findings to clinical practice to optimize treatments. Current research projects are focused on optimizing expectations of pregnant women on childbirth pain management, contrast effects, uncertainty, and training on expectation effects.

Annemarie Samuels Associate Professor

Annemarie Samuels is medical anthropologist and Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her work focuses on social inequalities in access to healthcare and on narratives and silences in experiences of illness and care. She has extensive ethnographic fieldwork experience in Indonesia and has widely published on a range of topics, including disaster recovery, narratives and silences, gender, HIV/AIDS, and end of life care. She is the author of After the Tsunami: Disaster Narratives and the Remaking of Everyday Life in Aceh (University of Hawai’i Press 2019) and co-editor of, amongst others, The Research Handbook on End of Life Care and Society (Edward Elgar 2025, with David Clark) and Tracing Silences: Towards an Anthropology of the Unspoken and Unspeakable (Routledge 2023, with Ana Dragojlovic). She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant project Globalizing Palliative Care?, the NWO-VIDI project The Future of Dying, and the KWF Cancer Fund project When Patients Prefer Non-Disclosure. Se is co-founder of the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network and member of the core theme group for research and teaching on health and wellbeing in the Leiden University Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Caroline Schep PhD candidate

Caroline (J.E.) Schep is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History. Her dissertation centers human subject research with new pharmaceutical drugs in late-colonial Indonesia. She particularly pays attention to the role of emotions in developing medical ethics.

Jessie van Straaten PhD candidate

Jessie van Straaten is a PhD candidate at Leiden University under the supervision of Prof. Marlou Schrover, Dr. Evelien Walhout and Dr. Paul van Trigt. She is part of a research project called ‘Human Development and Its Outliers: A Global Microhistory’, which envisions a broad evaluation of 20th century models of human development over the life course. She has a special interest in social and medical history, health and care, and the history of youth and old age. Her dissertation focuses on housing and care for older people in the Netherlands during the latter half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on intramural institutions.

Fenneke Sysling Assistant Professor

Fenneke Sysling is a historian of science, medicine, and colonialism. She is an assistant professor at the Institute for History at Leiden University. She currently leads a project on the history of human subject research in Southeast Asia during the first half of the twentieth century.

Paul van Trigt Assistant Professor

Paul van Trigt is assistant professor social history at Leiden University, specialized in the history of disability. Recently, his monograph about human rights and disability internationalism since the 1960s is published with Columbia University Press. In 2026, he will start a new project on disability and friendship from a transnational moral history perspective (ERC Consolidator Grant).

Susana Valdez University Lecturer

Susana Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Leiden University (Netherlands). Her research investigates the reception and accessibility of health information in multilingual contexts, with a particular focus on the impact of AI on healthcare communication. She is the principal investigator of an NWO-funded project examining how readers engage with translated health information, particularly examining the impact of machine translation on the reading process. She co-leads the Linguistic Data and Terminology working group as a board member of the European Masters in Translation network and sits on the advisory board of the Journal of Specialised Translation. Before taking up her current positions, she had spent 15 years working in the translation industry, and she was an invited lecturer at NOVA University and Lisbon University.

Evelien Walhout Assistant professor

I am Assistant Professor of Economic and Social History in the Department of History (Faculty of Humanities), specialising in historical demography, gender history, and the social history of health and care. My research focuses on infant and maternal mortality, adoption practices, the dynamics of epidemics, and cause-specific mortality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My current projects include Human Development and Its Outliers: A Global Microhistory (Startersbeurs), Stemmen van de Schelde, an oral history project on post-industrial health in port cities, and the citizen science project Doodsoorzaken.nl (in collaboration with Radboud University and Groningen University), which digitises Dutch individual-level cause-of-death records from 1850 to 1950, allowing for the analysis of health inequalities.

Claire Weeda Director of Education / University Lecturer

Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at Leiden University. Her main fields of interest include Graeco-Arabic environmental medicine, labour and race in Europe between 1100-1600. Recent publications include Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion and Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe, which she co-edited with Carole Rawcliffe.

Sara de Wit Assistant professor

I am an interdisciplinary anthropologist of climate change and global health in Africa. Specialization in climate change ethnographies & the ‘travelling’ of global discourses like climate change, development, gender and water security. Long-term, multi-sited fieldwork experiences in Madagascar, Cameroon, Tanzania and at international expert platforms. Experience with interdisciplinary research in the field of humanitarianism and development, studying different communities of expertise and practice (meteorologists, flood forecasters, humanitarians, development workers & farmers, nomadic herders) and negotiations around climate change, weather and forecasting in the anticipation of natural disasters. Carried out a history of the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene sector (WASH). Together with two Leiden colleagues, Miriam Waltz and Sheila Varadan, Sara has launched the LUNHA Hub (Leiden University Network for Health in Africa). I teach a BA course climate, health and medical encounters in Africa.