About me

Hi! I’m Ruben, a PhD candidate at Leiden University. As a historian, I study the history of politics and parliament. I apply computational techniques to study parliaments, the internet, newspapers, and much more.

I am interested in political history, cultural evolution, conceptual history and computational text analysis. Past projects have focused on the history of nationalism, iconic images and conceptual change in digitized newspapers.

Besides writing long papers, I also do some data visualization. I am interested in the way complex (historical and cultural) data can be visualized in an informative and appealing way.

I am currently wrapping up my dissertation. As of next Spring (2025) I will be on the job market. Do you like my academic work, my digital projects, or my data visualization? Let me know!