Description
Pim Huijnen works as an assistant professor of digital cultural history at Utrecht University. His main interests are in the circulation of knowledge between science and popular culture. He uses and develops digital techniques to do his research, mostly focusing on quantitative text analysis. Next to this, he experiments with the digitisation of historical material, as well as with digital means of presentation, dissemination, and collaboration.
Before, Huijnen worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO funded project Translantis. This project used and developed digital technologies to analyse the role of reference cultures in debates about social issues and collective identities, looking specifically at the emergence of the United States in public discourse in the Netherlands from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War. He also worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO/CLARIN funded Biland project at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Arts. This project focused on the identity, intensity and location of discourses about heredity, genetics and eugenics in Dutch and German news media between 1863 and 1940. For this, the project partners developed a text mining tool able to analyse and compare historical newspaper repositories from the Dutch National Library and the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.
Huijnen followed the BA and MA tracks in Modern History at the University of Groningen from 1997 to 2003, and wrote a MA-thesis on the Austrian theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest. He obtained his PhD in the history of science at the University of Amsterdam in 2011.