Dr. Tina van der Vlies is assistant professor of history and education at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. As a research associate, she is part of History at Erasmus and the Centre for Historical Culture.
In 2019 she obtained her PhD: Dr. van der Vlies analyzed English and Dutch history textbooks (1920-2010) to examine how and why national narratives were canonized, actualized, and perpetuated over time in this genre. History textbooks give information about agreed and preferred values, norms, and behavior. Consequently, they are a rather hybrid object of research, not only embedded in the context of a specific discipline with its own cultural status, tradition, and jargon, but also in the wider context of politics, media, (popular) culture, commerce, and education. History textbooks are heritage: they preserve and communicate cultural truths intergenerational. This genre contains inherited narratives about the past with the aim of transmitting these selected stories and their meanings to the next generations.
Her current research 'Why school history matters: public discourses on the purposes of history education, 1920-2020' is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO Rubicon). For this project, Dr. van der Vlies is affiliated with the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge (UK).
With the help of history, we can see societal challenges from new angles and in a new light. That is why Van der Vlies started to study history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam after her gymnasium graduation. She finished the master History of Society cum laude and with an extra honors trajectory. Afterwards, she went to ICLON at Leiden University and did a master’s in education (also cum laude).
For the great social impact of her research, Tina van der Vlies won in 2021 the Research Prize, which is awarded topromising PhD researchers who has made exceptional research achievements.
In December 2022, Tina van der Vlies’ first book Echoing Events was awarded with the Georg Eckert Research Award.
