dr. JC (Tina) van der Vlies

Biography

Tina van der Vlies is an associate professor in the History Department at Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL). She is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Dutch National Museum of Education.

Her academic and societal work engages with history, heritage, education, and (de)colonization, focusing on the historical contexts of knowledge production, contestation, and circulation. Drawing on memory studies, the history of knowledge, and educational history, she investigates how and why particular historical interpretations persist or change in shaping identities, power relations, societal perceptions and social imaginaries. Next to generating insights into these historical interpretations, she scrutinizes patterns and mechanisms of their (re)production. Curricula, as widespread and formative carriers of these interpretations, play a central role in this process. Her work has been awarded with several prizes, such as the Erasmus University Research Prize (2021) and the Georg Eckert Research Award (2022).

In December 2022 her book Echoing Events: The Perpetuation of National Narratives in English and Dutch History Textbooks, 1920-2010 was published. This book delves into the hidden ways of national narratives’ perpetuation by pointing out how narrated histories in textbooks overlapped and interfused. It shows how textbook authors have narrated different histories as ‘echoing events’ by interpreting them in the same way and by using the same combinations of historical analogies, giving meaning to history with these recurring connections. Her research revealed widespread schemata and frames of references in the narration of history, and refined James Wertsch' theory on narrative templates.

From 2022-2024, she was affiliated with the University of Cambridge (UK) for her NWO-funded Rubicon project: Why school history matters: public discourses on the purposes of history education, 1920–2020. She examined how and why ideas on the value and purpose of history for society changed in this period.

For other long research stays, she went to the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, the Institute of Education in London, and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories in Brighton.

Email: vandervlies@eshcc.eur.nl