Jessica den Oudsten

Jessica den Oudsten (1995) is a PhD candidate at Radboud University and a guest researcher at the Huygens Institute. Her PhD project ‘Integration and Social Mobility: The Descendants of Early Modern Immigrants in Amsterdam, 1660-1811’ addresses one of the major questions in Dutch migration history: what happened to the descendants of the hundreds of thousands of Germans, Flemings and Scandinavians who migrated to the Dutch Republic in the early modern period? The project zooms in on Amsterdam between 1660 and 1811 and focuses on the processes of integration and social mobility of the descendants of early modern immigrants.

Jessica studied History at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University. Her research master thesis is about the social mobility and integration of the descendants of early modern Norwegian and Danish immigrants in Amsterdam.

At Huygens Institute, she previously worked on the ‘Dutch Prize Papers’ project, in which she helped develop the Virtual Research Environment (VRE). She was also a researcher within the projects ‘Sailors on Dutch merchant marine, c. 1850-2000’ and ‘Maritime careers’, where she worked on sailor’s biographies.

In addition to her work as PhD candidate, she is a data curator at the Amsterdam City Archives, within the ‘Alle Amsterdamse Akten’ project. The aim of this project is to digitise and index the rich notarial archive of Amsterdam.

Publications

Jessica den Oudsten en Ramona Negrón, De grootste slavenhandelaren van Amsterdam. Over Jochem Matthijs en Coenraad Smitt (Walburg Pers, 2022).

Jessica den Oudsten, Judith Brouwer and Jelle van Lottum, ‘Van schoenlapper tot drossaard. De vroegmoderne Amsterdamse migrantenfamilie Wigtendaal’, Gen. Tijdschrift voor familiegeschiedenis 25:4 (2019) 14-19.