Didi van Trijp is historian of science and curator at Museon-Omniversum. She wrote her PhD thesis at Leiden University as part of the NWO project A New History of Fishes, entitled “Captured on Paper: Fish Books, Natural History and Questions of Demarcation in Eighteenth-Century Europe (c. 1680-1820)”, which she is now reworking into a book. In 2022, as a fellow at the Science History Institute (Philadelphia), she explored techniques for depicting iridescence in natural history illustrations. Her interest is in the material and visual culture of science, especially that of natural history. In this, she particularly looks at the contributions of people who have been underexposed. Besides her work as curator, she is book editor of history of science magazine Wonderkamer, board member of the Clusius Foundation and member of the advisory committee Colonial and slavery history of the Municipality of The Hague.
In 2023, she received a Museum grant from NWO for the project “Coming out of the woodwork? Colonial wood samples in an education museum, 1890-1940”. This research takes the wood samples in the Museum for the Benefit of Education (now: Museon-Omniversum) as a starting point. Wood samples have so far been seen mainly as ahistorical representations of the tree species from which they were carved, rather than as cultural-historical objects that played a crucial role in colonial exploitations. This research looks at how Dutch students developed a “material literacy” of the resources found in Suriname and the Dutch East Indies through these wood samples. For the duration of this project, she is a visiting researcher at both the Huygens Institute (KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit.
Publications
Captured on Paper: Fish Books, Natural History and Questions of Demarcation in Eighteenth-Century Europe (ca. 1680-1820) [thesis]
“François de Meyer’s Fish Travelogue (1698)” (met Paul J. Smith and Alan Moss), Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) (red. Paul J. Smith en Florike Egmond) (Brill: Leiden, 2023), pp. 523–553 [article in edited volume]
“Fresh Fish: Observation up Close in Seventeenth-Century England” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society 75 (2021) pp. 311–332 [article in journal]
“Aan de oppervlakte: een Zuid-Afrikaanse vissenhuid” in themanummer Wetenschap & de Koloniën, in Wonderkamer: Magazine voor Wetenschapsgeschiedenis 1 (2020) pp. 37–39 [article in magazine, popular]
“Cosmological Talk: Three Dialogues on the Heavens in Early Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam” in Renaissance Studies 32, (2018) pp. 140–157 [article in journal]
“Science Museums: A Panoramic View” (met Lara Bergers) in Isis 109 (2017) pp. 366–370 [article in journal]
