Welcome to new HHH board member Paul van Trigt
Dr. Paul van Trigt, University lecturer in Social History at Leiden University, has recently joined the HHH board, as Gemma Blok is leaving the board in the upcoming period. In the following text, Paul introduces himself and his research. We are excited to collaborate with him on upcoming events and initiatives!
Paul van Trigt
Since completing my PhD (2013) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the excitement of rethinking history and historical practice from a disability perspective has been at the core of my work as a historian. My PhD project was initially set up as a study into religious care for the blind, motivated by my training as a cultural historian of religion. Inspired by international historians working on disability, and by the interaction of history and policy, I developed the PhD-thesis into an analysis of the Dutch welfare state from a disability studies perspective. During my PhD research I explored transnational and comparative dimensions, and when I became a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project ‘Rethinking Disability’ in 2016, these dimensions expanded to a global scale. Since my appointment as (tenured) assistant professor in social history at Leiden University in 2020, I started pursuing three lines of research. Firstly, I investigate from a global history perspective how and why disability became an issue of human rights and of international law. Currently, I am finishing a monograph (under contract with Columbia University Press) about the history of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006). Secondly, I have collaborated with students, societal partners, and researchers on various aspects of disability and health resulting in a Dutch public history website focusing on the experiences of people with disabilities, DisPLACE.nl (2019). Lastly, I have become interested in the question how disabled people have dealt with the care/cure distinction and how they experience (in)formal support. I am involved in several research projects that enable me to investigate this question from different perspectives and sources, most recently a transdisciplinary project on the loneliness of people with mild intellectual disabilities.
