Staff and Fellows

Dr. Andrew J. M. Irving: ‘I research medieval religious material cultures. My research explores what we can learn about the nature of religion and belief by the study of things, spaces, and practices; it asks what is the relationship between the made/used religious object and its maker/user. My particular expertise lie in the books, objects, spaces, and practices of medieval liturgy. I am especially interested in the materiality of the medieval religious book – gospel books, mass books, prayer books - and what changes in design and traces and use of these book-objects can tell about the communities that used them.’

Dr. Mathilde van Dijk: ‘I am a cultural historian, specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly in the history of Late Medieval Reform and gender. Heritage is a recurrent theme in my work, for instance in my project on the appropriation of the Church Fathers and my work on the re-use of Early Church saints. In addition, I study the re-use of the late medieval reform movements such as the Devotio Moderna and Humanism as markers of contemporary Dutch culture and spirituality. Finally, I work on medievalism and popular culture, more specifically in film and television.

Watch this video with information on the Centre for Religion and Heritage and the research projects of Dr. Mathilde van Dijk.

Prof. Dr. Todd H. Weir is Associate Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture: ‘I am a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Germany and of the transnational history of religion and secularism. Before coming to Groningen in 2016, I taught history for nine years at Queen’s University Belfast. My research has focused on various aspects of the interaction of Christianity and secularism. I published a study on Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession in 2014 for Cambridge University Press (Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society). I have an abiding interest in conversion and apologetics. My next major research project will be a transnational history of the term worldview/Weltanschauung from 1790 to the present.

Eelco Nagelsmit (1982) is an historian of art and architecture and is affiliated as a fellow with the Centre for Religion and Heritage. His research focuses on the historical functions of art and architecture in their cultural, political and religious contexts, and is most concerned with the capacity of art to transform the beholder. His PhD dissertation (universities of Ghent and Leiden, 2014) approached the patronage of art and architecture in seventeenth-century Brussels from an anthropological perspective, considering the role of objects and buildings as “agents of change” in the Counter-Reformation. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen he closely collaborated with church historians in an ERC-project about religious culture in France and Germany during the “long seventeenth century”. This project explored how early modern subjects negotiated the tension between religious withdrawal from the world, and engagement with it, by looking across different artistic media. In 2018 he received an NWO VENI-grant for his research project “Divine Denkraum: Early Modern Protestant Princes and Theologians Exchanging Thoughts through Things”. In this project he focused on courtly gift-exchange between princes and their theologian advisors as a means of politico-religious communication. In this context he co-created a virtual reconstruction of an eighteenth-century model of the Temple of Solomon from Germany. Having held postdoctoral and teaching positions at the Universities of Copenhagen, ETH Zurich, Groningen, and Leiden, he currently teaches art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a member of the editorial board of Virtus: Journal of Nobility Studies.

Project description

In the academic year 2024-2025 Eelco has been granted visiting fellowships by the KU Leuven Institute LECTIO and the Study and Documentation Centre Capuchins in the Low Countries, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), and he will be Scholar-in-residence at the Dutch University Institute for Art History in Florence (NIKI). During these stays, he will conduct research into the seventeenth-century use of citation of older works of art as “historical evidence”. His project is entitled “Exhibiting Evidentia in Franciscan Polemics between Italy and Flanders: Carolus of Arenberg and Gillis Backereel’s ‘Icones Antiquae’ (c. 1660s)” and focuses on the patronage and function of a series of paintings of Franciscan saints in landscapes, painted by the Flemish painter Gillis Backereel at the behest of the Capuchin monk Carolus van Arenberg. Once gracing the walls of the Brussels Capuchin church, and presently dispersed in various churches around Belgium (if not lost), their life-size saintly figures were copies after thirteenth- and fourteenth-century works of art from around Europe, especially Italy. What was the reason for harking back to such temporally and spatially remote models? The project sets out to understand this seventeenth-century “medieval revival”, by situating it in the context of monastic polemics across different media, and elucidating its function as a strategy for exhibiting evidentia, a classical concept understood in the early modern period as evidentness: clarity beyond doubt. By studying works of art, manuscripts and archival documents, the project aims to elucidate the role of these artworks and images in articulating Carolus’ learned position, in the context of its wider importance for the Capuchin mission and the Catholic Reformation at large, as well as for the history of knowledge. As such the project aims to contribute to current scholarly debates on the ways in which the production of plausibility and Evidenz (self-evidence: a – often visual – revelation of certainty without need of further legitimation) have evolved historically.

Lieke Wijnia (1985) is affiliated as postdoc with the CRH, where she runs the research cluster “Art and religious heritage”. She works as chief organizer for the international conference “Religious Heritage in a Diverse Europe”, which takes place in June 2019 in Groningen. Furthermore, she is co-convener of the international research network “Visionary Artists, Visionary Objects (1800-now)”, together with Dr. Naomi Billingsley (Manchester University), and she is co-editor of the volume “The Bible and Global Tourism” (Bloomsbury Press), together with Dr. James Bielo (Miami University, Ohio).

In her research, she applies interdisciplinary methods in studying the dynamics between artistic practices, contemporary manifestations of religion, and cultural heritage. In 2016, she cum laude defended her PhD dissertation on contemporary perceptions of the sacred during festival Musica Sacra Maastricht, at Tilburg University. She received an MA Art History at the Courtauld Institute, London (2008), an MA Heritage Studies at Utrecht University (2007, cum laude), and a BA in Humanities at University College Utrecht (2003, cum laude).

Maaike de Jong (1969) contributes to knowledge about heritage, museums and tourism to the research and teaching activities of the CRH. De Jong was trained at the UvT / University of Amsterdam and earned her Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 2014 with a dissertation on the complexity of cultural identity and belonging. Her publications include “Implications for Managed Visitor Experiences at Muktinath Temple (Chumig Gyatsa) in Nepal;” “Native American Objects, Tourism, and Museums. A De-Reterritorialized View;” “The Museum as Visitor Experience: Displaying Sacred Haitian Vodou objects,” among others. De Jong is a Senior Lecturer at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences and an Assistant Professor in Sustainable Entrepreneurship at the University of Groningen, Campus Fryslân. Moreover, she is a member of the Professorship in Sustainable innovation in the Regional Knowledge Economy (NHL Stenden University & Alfa-college).

De Jong is currently conducting research which intends to contribute to sustainable development within fields that are relevant to heritage, museums, and tourism. She develops and participates in research projects with national and international scholars and other stakeholders. Currently, she focuses on three themes using applied philosophy and critical theory. The following themes discuss how communities engage with questions that involve heritage, cultural identity, and belonging:

1. Research on collection ethics and responsibility. Museum representation: housing, care, and restitution of museums’ sensitive collections. Dialogue with source communities (Museum of the Rockies, Quai Branly Museum, Tropenmuseum, Néprajzi Múzeum)
2. Heritage as a driver of sustainable development and communities (Veenhuizen & Frederiksoord)
3. Museums as platforms for sustainable cities and communities (Humboldt Forum, Museum of Boulder, District Six Museum)

De Jong aims at opening up discussions about heritage, museum (collections), and tourism in new ways through these projects. She also wants to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals on issues such as ‘sustainable cities and regions’ and ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships.’

Sabina is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Groningen, serving the multi-disciplinary faculty of Campus Fryslan. 

She is a laureate of the prestigious MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her project “Transformation of Female Religious Spaces and Objects into Modern Museum Contexts” combines art history, museum, and heritage studies with a gender lens to investigate how historical spaces and artifacts are transformed when integrated into modern cultural institutions. The Center for Religion and Heritage, within the Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society hosts her research at the University of Groningen.

She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Sapienza University of Rome and Masaryk University in Brno in 2023, with a thesis offering a reappraisal of 10th-century art and culture in Rome.

Sabina has a strong international research background, having contributed to projects across Italy, Czechia, France, and the USA. She was a researcher on the MSCA Horizon Project “Conques in the Global World,” a Pre-doc Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Art History – Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and a visiting scholar at CUNY in New York.

Paul Ariese (1975) is a fellow at the Center for Religion and Heritage, with which he works closely in the context of the Network Religious Heritage. Ariese is a senior lecturer in the international Master’s programme Applied Museum and Heritage Studies and the Bachelor’s programme Cultural Heritage at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts), where he lectures on heritage and religion, among other subjects.

Currently Ariese is pursuing a PhD degree at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (University of Amsterdam). The topic of his research is the intertwining of religious and heritage practices at the synagogues of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam. The question is what religious meanings, sensations and experiences are evoked in people today by the Portuguese Synagogue (both a heritage site and place of worship) and the musealised space of the Great Synagogue. This empirical research explores how Sephardic and Ashkenazic source communities, heritage professionals and museum audiences interpret, shape and use these spaces. The case study provides insight into the interaction between religion and heritage, paving a path to reposition Jewish religious heritage in the increasingly secular and pluriform Dutch society.

Ariese has been involved in numerous projects for museums and heritage institutions all over the Netherlands, as well as museum projects and museum capacity building programmes in the Middle East, East Africa, and South(east) Asia. He is a graduate of the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies (MA with distinction) and also trained as an architectural and graphic designer.

The topic of his research is the intertwining of religious and heritage practices at the synagogues of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam.

Tharik Hussain (1979) is affiliated as a fellow with the Centre for Religion and Heritage. He is an author, journalist, broadcaster and consultant specialising in Muslim heritage and culture. Tharik’s work often serves to decolonise authorised and popular religious and cultural histories and narratives by working closely with academic and grassroots institutions.

For example, he has created Britain’s first Muslim heritage trails ‘The Woking Trail’ and ‘The Muslim Cemetery Walk’; edited a special revival edition of the historic British Muslim journal, ‘The Islamic Review’; and helped to develop Muslim-Jewish heritage trails with the University of Oxford and JTrails. He has also producing award-winning radio on America’s earliest mosques and Muslim communities, written variously about the indigenous Muslim cultures of countries like Romania, Lithuania and Thailand, and is an author at Lonely Planet. Tharik is currently working on his book ‘Minarets in the Mountains; a Journey into Muslim Europe’, about following in the footsteps of Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi in search of Europe’s indigenous Muslim culture.

Tharik has been named one of the UK's most inspiring British Bangladeshis and is an advisor to the Foundation for Jewish Heritage, the Institute of Islamic Art Thailand and a number of heritage projects around the world. He received an MA in Islamic Studies from the University of London, a BA(hons) in Media and Cultural Studies from Middlesex University and is a qualified Further Education Lecturer (PGCE FE) with almost two decades of teaching experience.