Biographical Summary

David de Boer is an assistant professor of European history at Radboud University Nijmegen and a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam. He is broadly interested in how people in the past thought about moral obligation, created transnational solidarity networks, and managed migration in a globalizing world. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz and Leiden University, and held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the Leibniz Institute of European History, and the European University Institute. His first monograph, The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution: The Making of Humaniatiarism(Oxford University Press, 2023), investigates the rise of the printing press as a humanitarian lever in the 17th and 18th centuries. The book won the 2024 D.J. Veegens Prize for Dutch history, awarded by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities.

He is currently working on two new research projects. The first traces the evolution of debates about global migration management in Dutch and German news media (1700-1900). The second is an interdisciplinary investigation with educational specialists into how historical awareness of past migrations can facilitate discussions about today’s migratory movements in secondary education.

Research Project

• News and the Emergence of a Global Migration Debate (ca. 1700–1900)
  The refugee has always been a contested social category. Ever since the term came in common parlance in 17th century Europe, migrants, governments, and other stakeholders have hotly debated who counts as a refugee, how host societies should treat them, and what opportunities and risks they potentially pose. The aim of this project is to explore how these initially local debates about displaced people gradually universalized between ca. 1700 and 1900. As migratory movements globalized in the 18th century, news media increasingly pieced together different migration stories to pose fundamental questions about human mobility – some of which still echo in today’s migration debates. Focusing on Dutch and German news media, the project investigates how observers began to compare different refugee groups across the globe, evaluated different migration regimes, and discerned supposedly universal patterns such as the so-called ‘suction effect’. In doing so, it aims to trace the gradual emergence of a global migration debate, and gauge its impact on international refugee politics.