General Director

Prof. dr. Joris van Eijnatten


Joris van Eijnatten (PhD 1993) is the General Director of the Netherlands eScience Center and Professor of Digital History ‘by special appointment’ at Utrecht University since 2020.

Joris served as full professor of Cultural History both at Utrecht University between 2009 and 2019 and VU University Amsterdam between 2007 and 2009. Among other things, he has been 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).

Joris has also held a number of administrative posts. He chaired Utrecht University’s section of History of Culture, Mentalities and Ideas between 2009 and 2018, and was head of Utrecht University’s Department of History and Art History from 2013 to 2018. Previously, he was Director of the Research Institute for Language, Culture and History at VU Amsterdam’s Faculty of Arts.

Joris has been the recipient of a range of 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 numerous books, journal articles and contributions to books, and is a co-founder of the International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity.

As General Director of the eScience Center, Joris’ portfolio consists of the following:

  • Communications and Events
  • Community and Dissemination
  • General Management
  • General Strategy

Key skill

  • dabbler in NLP
  • digital and conceptual history nerd
  • mission driven
  • passionate about bringing visions to life
  • text analysis
  • text mining and analysis
  • the imperative to strategy