Nadine Akkerman - Biography#

Nadine Akkerman studied English Language in Literature at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam from 1996 to 2001. A visiting scholar at Queen Mary, University of London, at Prof. Lisa Jardine's Centre of Editing Lives and Letters in 2006, she began lecturing at Leiden University in 2007. Her PhD in English literature (cum laude) was awarded in November 2008 by the VU Amsterdam. A regular guest on tv and radio, Dr Akkerman shows an ability to communicate her research to the general public as well as grant agencies, and has raised over 3m in funding for various research projects (personal and collaborative) since her PhD. An acclaimed literary historian, she is the award-winning author of Invisible Agents, which for the very first time uncovered women's contribution to the world of 17th-century espionage. Her latest book, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts, is the authoritative biography of the daughter of James VI/I and sometime Queen of Bohemia. She is also editor of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart (3 vols), all with Oxford University Press, and is contracted by Yale University Press to co-author a trade book on early modern spycraft (publ. 2024). Her research appeals strongly to the general public, yet remains primarily fundamental in nature. She has won numerous prestigious awards, such as the World Cultural Council Award in recognition of the transformative effect of her work (2017), and the Ammodo Science Award for fundamental research in the Humanities in (2019). In 2017 she was elected to the Young Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Netherlands (KNAW). Currently, she is Reader in early modern English literature at Leiden University and Principal Investigator of an ERC Consolidator Project. This project, entitled FEATHERS - (Fe / Males and their scribes) Authorship and the Mediation of Voices, c. 1558-1642 - will run to 2025 and investigates the collaborative nature of early modern authorship in legal texts, governmental letters, and literary works.