Joris van Eijnatten appointed director of Netherlands eScience Center

3 Oct 2019 - 4 min

The Supervisory Board of the Netherlands eScience Center has appointed Professor Joris van Eijnatten as general director of the eScience Center, effective 1 January 2020. Van Eijnatten, who is currently professor of Cultural History at Utrecht University, succeeds Wilco Hazeleger.

As director of the Netherlands eScience Center, Van Eijnatten will provide strategic leadership to the Center’s approximately 70 research engineers and support staff. He will be responsible for the preparation, development and implementation of the Center’s policy and strategy, and will ensure that its strategic and operational objectives are achieved. In addition, Van Eijnatten will be tasked with further positioning the eScience Center as the Dutch national center of excellence for the development and application of research software and methodologies. As such, he will stimulate greater collaboration with Dutch academia and researchers and seek to intensify the Center’s links with other digital research initiatives in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

“We are extremely pleased that Joris van Eijnatten has agreed to lead the eScience Center”, says Jan de Jeu, chair of the eScience Center Supervisory Board. “Besides his impressive research and teaching credentials, Joris brings a wealth of senior administrative experience. He has extensive knowledge of the Dutch research landscape and a clear vision on the increasing importance of eScience in driving new research outcomes.”

“The Netherlands eScience Center will benefit greatly from Joris’ expertise and experience”, says Prof. Rob van Nieuwpoort, director of Technology. “We as the board of directors look forward to working with him to ensure that we execute our core mandate: to accelerate and enhance research through the application of eScience.”

The appointment of Joris van Eijnatten has the unanimous support of the eScience Center Works Council, says Maarten van Meersbergen, chair. “We are pleased and excited that the vacancy was filled by a very established and well-liked professor with a background in a discipline with such potential and complexity. We are confident thathis leadership will bring renewed stability to the Center and ensure we continue to grow sustainably.”

Van Eijnatten: “Over the past six or seven years, it has been my mission in life to encourage interest in the application of digital methodologies and technologies in the Humanities, both in research and teaching. The position of general director at the Netherlands eScience Center will enable me to continue this work on a wholly different level: nationally, internationally and across all disciplines. I am especially looking forward to working with the people at the Center, who are key to both continuity and change in the rapidly evolving world of eScience research.”

About Joris van Eijnatten

Joris van Eijnatten has served as full professor of Cultural History at Utrecht University since 2009. Prior to this, he was, among other things, full professor of Cultural History at VU University Amsterdam and a research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institut für europäische Geschichte (Mainz, Germany) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS).

In addition to his research and teaching duties, Van Eijnatten has held various substantial administrative posts. From 2013 to 2018, he was head of Utrecht University’s department of History and Art History, and chaired UU’s section of History of Culture, Mentalities and Ideas between 2009 and 2018. Previously, he was director of the Research Institute for Language, Culture and History at VU Amsterdam’s Faculty of Arts.

Van Eijnatten has been the recipient of various grants, including a Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) grant and an NWO Horizon grant. He was awarded the Hendrik Casimir-Karl Ziegler Research Prize in 1999 and a Fellowship for digital humanities at the National Library of the Netherlands in 2016. He is the author of several books and numerous journal and book articles and is a founder of the open-access International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity. He has published extensively in leading international peer-reviewed media, including Journal for the History of Ideas, International Journal of Intangible Heritage, Low Countries Historical Review and the Journal of Religious Ethics.