MEDIATE


Understanding the literary system of the 18th century

Contact us

  • MEDIATE
  • Prof. dr. Alicia Montoya
  • Radboud University
  • Department of Romance Languages
  • P.O. Box 9103
  • 6500 HD Nijmegen
  • The Netherlands

Email: alicia.montoya@ru.nl

Meet our team

Prof. dr. Alicia C. Montoya

Alicia Montoya was Principal Investigator of MEDIATE and Professor of French Literature and Culture at Radboud University, The Netherlands. She is currently the PI of the Dutch Research Council-funded Vici project Civic Fictions: Modelling book-reader interactions in the Age of Revolution, c. 1760-1830. She is the author of Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge 2013), Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Paris 2007) and the co-editor of several volumes, including La Pensée Sérielle, du Moyen Age aux Lumières (Leiden 2019), Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production (Leiden, 2010), Women Writing Back / Writing Back Women: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era (Leiden, 2010) and Lumières et histoire / Enlightenment and History (Paris 2010). She is an advisory editor for Book History and for Brill's Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture series.

Email: alicia.montoya@ru.nl

Dr. Helwi Blom

Helwi Blom (PhD Utrecht University) is a literary historian whose research focuses on early modern France. Her scholarly interests include chivalric romance, popular print (the Bibliothèque bleue), library history, the Huguenot diaspora, and reception studies. She is currently Lecturer in French at Radboud University, Nijmegen, where she also conducts postdoctoral research on private libraries confiscated during the French Revolution (Civic Fictions project). She is also involved in the IMAGINARM project at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her research for the MEDIATE project focused on catalogues of private book collections published in France between ca. 1600 and 1830. Recent publications include articles and co-edited volumes on early modern French catalogues, French sixteenth-century printer Claude Nourry (Droz 2024), and on Top Ten Fictional Narratives in Early Modern Europe (De Gruyter 2023).

Email: helwi.blom@ru.nl

Dr. Evelien Chayes

Evelien Chayes (PhD University of Amsterdam) has authored and co-edited books and published articles on early modern networks in the Veneto, intellectual exchanges in the Venetian ghetto, private libraries and the circulation of (censored) books between France, Italy and Cyprus. At the CNRS Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes in Paris she worked on the reconstruction of Michel de Montaigne's network in the Parliament of Bordeaux. She is an editorial board member of the Mediterranean Nexus 1100-1700 book series, published by Brepols. As a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project she focuses on Italian private libraries.

Dr. Ann-Marie Hansen

Ann-Marie Hansen participated in the MEDIATE project as an associated Radboud Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-21). She holds a PhD from McGill University and specialises in reader interactions with early European print, notably through composite volumes (Sammelbände). She has since gone on to serve as project manager of ‘Unlocking the Fagel Collection’, working with a Dutch eighteenth-century heritage library at Trinity College Dublin.

Email: anhansen@tcd.ie

Dr. Rindert Jagersma

Rindert Jagersma (PhD, University of Amsterdam) is a book historian and cataloguer, specialised in the (quantitative approach of the) book trade of Dutch Republic around 1700. In the MEDIATE project, he focuses on Dutch auction catalogues and their owners. His publications concern book ownership and private book collections in the long eighteenth century; the life and works of the Dutch pamphleteer Ericus Walten (1662-1697) and the importance of pamphleteers and booksellers in the dissemination of the radical Enlightenment; and the identification of the hitherto unknown printers of the works of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677).

Dr. Juliette Reboul

Juliette Reboul is trained as a historian. She specialises in the circulation of objects, ideas and people in eighteenth-century Europe. She worked on the FBTEE project (University of Western Sydney), before joining the MEDIATE team at Radboud University in Nijmegen. In this project, she focuses on printed auction catalogues of British private libraries. Her PhD thesis examined the experiences and memories of French emigrants in the British Isles in response to the French Revolution. It has been published in Palgrave Macmillan's series 'War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850' as French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution.

Anna E. de Wilde, MA

Anna de Wilde participates in the MEDIATE project as a PhD student, focusing on Hebrew and Jewish books in Dutch auction catalogues. She studied History and Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She specialized in the book culture of the Sephardic community in early modern Amsterdam. Before joining the MEDIATE team Anna worked as a researcher at Ets Haim - Livraria Montezinos, the world's oldest functioning Jewish library.

Technical development and project support

Micha Hulsbosch, MA

Micha Hulsbosch has a background in Language and Speech Technology. He is part of the Technical Support Group Humanities Lab and develops software for the Humanities research community, in particular Language research. In the MEDIATE project Micha is mainly tasked with the development of the MEDIATE database webapplication.

Email: micha.hulsbosch@ru.nl

Joanna Rozendaal, MA

Joanna Rozendaal participates in the MEDIATE project as project assistant. She will be coordinating the transcription project, which includes harvesting, transcribing, and digitizing eighteenth century private library auction catalogues. Joanna holds an MA in Arts and Culture, specialising in Dutch Golden Age Studies, with a particular interest in Book History.

Email: joanna.rozendaal@ru.nl

Dr. Jason Ensor

Jason Ensor (Western Sydney University) is an external advisor on the technical development and database construction for MEDIATE. At Western Sydney, he was Chief Investigator with Professor Simon Burrows on the 'Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment' Australian Research Council Discovery Project. He publishes in the field of Australian Book History and on matters related to research impact and rethinking scholarship in the digital age. In 2015 he was Conference Director for 'Global Digital Humanities' and in 2018 he convened the SHARP congress in Sydney, Australia.

Email: J.Ensor@westernsydney.edu.au

Student assistants

Laurie Hoeben, MA

Laurie participated in the MEDIATE project as project assistant and helped with the collection and cleaning of the data. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. As part of the project Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network) Laurie aims to clarify why certain French medieval texts (and not others) were selected for print and what changes were made in the transition from manuscript to print.

Francesca Licata, MA

Francesca Licata participated in the MEDIATE project during her Research Master in Literary Studies at Radboud University. She contributed to the project by sourcing lists of books from private libraries discovered through her field research in the municipal archives of Taranto, a southern Italian city. There, she consulted, collected and transcribed notarial documents from the second half of the eighteenth century.