Dr. Natália da Silva Perez, assistant professor of history at the Erasmus School of History, Culture, and Communication has been awarded a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the project “That's Women's Work!” The five-year research project will investigate how European colonial powers shaped cultural ideas about women's work between 1600 and 1900 - ideas that continue to influence gender inequalities today.
The project addresses a crucial gap in our understanding of how gendered labour hierarchies became embedded in global culture. Women worldwide still provide 76.2 percent of total unpaid care work hours, a disparity with deep historical roots in colonial ideologies.
“My project will reveal how colonial expansion reshaped gender roles across continents, creating shared narratives about women’s work that transcended imperial borders,” said Dr. da Silva Perez. “By understanding these historical mechanisms, we can better address the persistent devaluation of women's labour in contemporary society.”
Innovative Mixed-Methods Approach
The research team will employ a pioneering combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, integrating traditional archival research with cutting-edge artificial intelligence. The project will examine five historical sites selected for their transimperial characteristics: Holland, Pernambuco (Brazil), New France (Quebec), the Gold Coast (Ghana), and Java (Indonesia).
Using historical documents including diaries, letters, court records, and notarial documents, the team will reconstruct women's lived experiences and examine how they complied with - or resisted - ideological impositions on their activities. This qualitative foundation will inform large-scale quantitative analysis using statistical modelling to trace how biased discourses spread through newspapers, literature, religious texts, medical manuals, and legal codes across multiple empires.
Building the Research Team
Dr. da Silva Perez’s current research group has two postdocs and one PhD candidate focusing on women’s history. The Vidi grant will enable her to expand her team with two more PhD candidates who will focus on complementary aspects of women's work across imperial borders. The team will also contribute to developing ethically-informed AI applications for historical research, helping to mitigate bias in computational approaches to historical documents.
International Collaboration
The project leverages Dr. da Silva Perez’s network of international collaborators, including historians from the University of Copenhagen, Leiden University, Federal University of Santa Maria (Brazil), and AI specialists from Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Copenhagen.
All research outputs—including datasets, computational models, and publications—will be made openly accessible to advance both historical scholarship and digital humanities methodologies. “As an ambassador for Open and Responsible Science at the ESHCC, I hold Open Science close to my heart: my Vidi project will put these ideals in practice,” said Dr. da Silva Perez.
About the NWO Vidi Grant
The Vidi grant is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Talent Programme, which supports experienced researchers to develop their own innovative line of research and build their own research group. The grant is awarded to outstanding researchers who have conducted successful research for a number of years after obtaining their PhD.
- Researcher
