Joris Oddens

Biography

Joris Oddens (1981) studied Dutch, European Studies and History in Amsterdam and Florence. He obtained his PhD in 2012 from the University of Amsterdam, with an award-winning dissertation on the history of the first Dutch parliament (1796-98). He has also worked as a researcher and lecturer in Nijmegen, Groningen, Leiden and Padua, and he was a fellow at the Dutch Institutes in Rome and Istanbul.

Oddens studies the political culture of the Netherlands between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a focus on the seventeenth century and the eighteenth-century age of revolutions. He is interested in the political significance of culture in a narrow sense (for example literary texts or paintings), while also trying to understand, in a broader sense, how politics worked and which ideas shaped political attitudes and behaviour. His looks at both the political centre and the periphery, studying elites as well as ordinary citizens.

Oddens has written about topics ranging from elevated Stoic ideals in the friendship books of revolutionary statesmen to everyday political practices on the tiny Dutch island of Ameland. He has also published on emotions in politics, religious violence, bicameralism, self fashioning, ghosts, and the Dutch in the Ottoman Empire. He has edited volumes about the revolutionary sister republics, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, the concept of decline, and the representation of power.

In recent years, Oddens has worked on the history of petitioning. This research has resulted in a book on petitions and politics in the Netherlands (1780-1860), which was published in 2023. This study shows that the Netherlands remained a petitionary society until long after the introduction of parliamentary democracy.

Oddens has become increasingly interested in works of art as a source of historical research. His current research focuses on the famous Netherlandish group portraits from the centuries between 1400 and 1700. This project aims to come to new insights about the functions portraits fulfilled within pre-modern political culture.

At the Huygens Institute, Oddens leads the Political Culture and History research group. In 2016, he was among the founding editors of Early Modern Low Countries; between 2019 and 2023, he chaired the editorial board of this journal. From 2021 to 2024, Oddens led the NWO-funded project REPUBLIC, which resulted in a web application providing access to all resolutions of the States General (1576-1796).