Research group Management
Specialisation Early modern history of knowledge
Contact dirk.van.miert@huygens.knaw.nl
+31 (0)20 224 6800

Projects and Publications

At the Huygens Institute he has also been PI of several projects, including Clariah-Plus and OpenJournals.nl. His publications cover epistolary culture, biblical criticism, the history of universities and education, Latin language and culture, the history of (classical) philology, humanism, German Idealism, gender, and confessionalisation. His current research focuses on applying network analysis and text mining to understand how early modern knowledge networks functioned in Europe.

Chair and Advisory Roles

Since August 2025, Van Miert holds the chair in History of Knowledge from a Digital Perspective (endowed by the KNAW) at the Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University. He also serves on the executive boards of CLARIAH-NL (digital infrastructure for the humanities in the Netherlands) and of the Thematic Digital Competence Center for the Social Sciences and Humanities (TDCC-SSH).

He is a member of various scientific advisory boards: the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), KU Leuven’s research institute LECTIO, RESILIENCE (European Infrastructure for Religious Studies), and the editorial boards of the Journal for the History of Knowledge (JHoK) and Lias. Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources. He holds these positions in non-remunerated capacity.

Research and Utrecht University

After his period at the Huygens Institute, Van Miert joined the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, contributing to a project on classifications of knowledge in the age of Immanuel Kant. From 2016, first as Assistant and later as Associate Professor of Cultural History, he led the ERC Consolidator project Sharing Knowledge in Learned and Literary Networks (SKILLNET). Between 2019 and 2021 he  was head of the Department of Cultural History at the Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University.

Education and Early Career

Dirk van Miert studied Latin literature and received his PhD in Amsterdam (2004) with a dissertation on the institutional and cultural history of the Athenaeum Illustre, the predecessor of the University of Amsterdam. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, where, together with Paul Botley, he prepared the critical edition of The Correspondence of Joseph Justus Scaliger (2012). At the Huygens Institute he wrote The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590–1670 (Oxford, 2018).

Portrait of Dirk van Miert

Dirk van Miert. Photo: Monique Kooijmans.