Category:Helmer J. Helmers

Helmer Helmers is lecturer in early modern Dutch literature and culture at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He obtained his doctorate with the highest possible distinction at Leiden University in 2011. With Nadine Akkerman, he recently led the NWO research project on the Texel shipwreck BZN17, Maritime Archaeology Meets Cultural History (2017-2018). He is currently a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), where he is working on his book The First Cold War. Dutch Print Culture and International Relations, 1560-1648.

Helmers specializes in Dutch cultural history, focusing especially on the intersections between literary culture and politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. He is the author of The Royalist Republic. Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, paperback edition 2016), which was runner-up for the SRS book prize in 2016. With Geert Janssen, he has edited the Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is also founding editor of the Open Access journal The Early Modern Low Countries.

Helmers is board member of the Amsterdam School of History (ASH) and Chairman of the Huizinga Institute Programme Team. In 2018, he was elected member of the Dutch Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie) and the Amsterdam Young Academy (AYA).