Kerrewin van Blanken studied history at Utrecht University and Queen’s University Belfast, with a focus on Early Modern cultural history and the history of knowledge. He graduated in 2019 with a prizewinning thesis on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century eyewitness accounts of earthquakes. He has also worked as an assistant archivist at the International Institute for Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam.

As a PhD candidate on the project ‘Inventing Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe’, Kerrewin is looking at the role that printed media played in the diplomatic relations between the Dutch Republic and France in the seventeenth century. To what extent did (transnational) public debates influence international politics? And how did diplomats try to steer and respond to the public sphere?