Introducing: Jessie van Straaten
Jessie van Straaten recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate as part of Evelien Walhout's starting grant project 'Human Development and Its Outliers: A Global Microhistory'. Below she introduces herself.
Hello everyone! My name is Jessie and I started my PhD at the Institute of History in September. While a lot is new since I started – a new research topic and receiving a salary that is higher than my rent – a lot is also quite familiar, for example the city and the university. I started my Bachelor’s in History here in 2019 and soon moved away from my parental home in West Friesland to a student house in Leiden. After finishing my Bachelor’s, I stayed here and participated in the Research Master’s Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence, which I finished in the summer of 2024. Already in the first year of my Bachelor’s degree, I was particularly interested in social and medical history. In most of my courses I returned to a topic related to either medicine or to the history of children and childhood, often combining to two, for example in my research on the treatment of children by surgeons aboard Dutch slave ships. For my MA thesis I decided to take a more quantitative approach. I studied the patient registers of the Stadsziekenhuis in Hoorn for the period 1867-1915. By creating a database of more than 4.000 patients, I was able to study patterns in patient admission and mortality.
I was not always sure whether I wanted to pursue a PhD. I didn't know anyone in my personal life who had done so and I wasn't sure what to expect from it. However, I have always enjoyed the research I had done and the inspiring environment of the university. When I saw the vacancy for this PhD, I immediately put my doubts aside and knew that this was what I wanted to do. Reading about the project, the topic and the fact that the timeframe fit perfectly with my graduation was the only push I needed and the decision to apply was quickly made. Having studied in Leiden for five years means that I see a lot of familiar faces each day, also in my own project group. I feel very fortunate that my daily supervisor is Dr. Evelien Walhout, who also supervised my BA and MA thesis.
While it is nice to see familiar faces, it is also very exciting to meet new people both in the project and at the institute. I am happy to be able to stay in Leiden for another four years and that I get to work with researchers who inspired me so much during my studies. Although I consider myself lucky to have been able to move into my own apartment after years of living with other students, my office in the Huizinga building is by far my favourite place to work. In particular, the friendly and cooperative working environment of the History Department as a whole, but especially the Social and Economic History Department, has been a great part of working here. It feels very special to be able to call the professors and teachers I looked up to during the five years I studied here colleagues.
I am very excited about the coming years and the research I will be performing on 'the elderly' in policy and medical literature. My dissertation will focus on the housing policy for older people in the 1940s to 1980s and the influence of different actors on the policy process and outcomes, to learn how changes in these policies can be explained and to understand which voices were heard and which were not in the making of these policies and in the aims of these policies.