Biography
Jim van der Meulen is a social historian. After studying History at the University of Amsterdam, he earned his PhD in 2017 at the University of Antwerp. Between 2017 and 2024, he worked alternately as a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (2017-2021; 2022-2024) and the University of Oxford (2021-2022). Since October 2022, he has also been one of the supervisors in the team project Lordship and Agrarian Capitalism in the Low Countries, 1350-1650 (in collaboration with Frederik Buylaert, Thijs Lambrecht, and Dirk Heirbaut) at Ghent University. From 2022 to 2024, he was affiliated as a guest researcher with the REPUBLIC project at the Huygens Institute. His personal project within this framework was an inventory of eyewitness accounts (‘parliamentary diaries’) of the meetings of the States General (1588-1702). He is an editorial board member of Virtus – Journal of Nobility Studies and Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis. Since 2024, he has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
His research focuses on the Low Countries (both north and south, and increasingly overseas territories) in the period 1300-1700. Within this framework, he has a broad range of interests, with a central theme being the relationship between power structures and long-term economic, political, and cultural developments. Since 2024, he has been exploring the historical relationship between power, environment, and ecology. The central question in this research is how and why people in the past exerted power over the non-human natural world and how, in turn, that natural world influenced human power structures.
Since 2025, Van der Meulen has been working as a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute as a member of the research group Political Culture and History.
Key publications:
van der Meulen, J. (2022). Woven into the Urban Fabric: Cloth Manufacture and Economic Development in the Flemish West-Quarter (1300-1600). Studies in European Urban History 54. Brepols Publishers.
Graham-Goering, E., van der Meulen, J. & Buylaert, F., eds. (2025). Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe. British Academy/Oxford University Press.
Brandsma, M. & van der Meulen, J. (2024). “The Lordscape: Mapping Seigneurial Jurisdictions in the Late-Medieval Low Countries.” Journal of Historical Geography 86: 355–71.
van der Meulen, J. (2021). “Seigneurial Governance and the State in Late Medieval Guelders (14th-16th Centuries).” Continuity and Change 36: 33–59.
van der Meulen, J. (2018). “Corporate Collective Action and the Market Cycle of the Cloth Industry in Nieuwkerke, Flanders, 1300-1600.” Social History 43: 375–99.
