Fellow in Focus: Dr Nina Lamal

Recorded March 20th, 2025. Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow Dr Nina Lamal (Huygens Instituut, KNAW, Netherlands) in conversation with Dr Ann-Marie Hansen (Fagel Collection Project Manager, Library, TCD). Bio: Dr Nina Lamal is an early modern historian based at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam. Her research focuses on early modern political history, diplomacy, the transnational histories of the book, and digital humanities. She studied early modern history at the KU Leuven. In 2014, she received her PhD from the KU Leuven and St Andrews University for her thesis on Italian news reports, political debates and historical writing on the Revolt in the Low Countries (1566-1648). Her book Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries was published with Brill in 2023. From 2015-2017, Lamal worked as postdoctoral research assistant at the Universal Short Title Catalogue project (university of St Andrews). In 2017, she moved to the university of Antwerp, after she had obtained a three-year individual postdoctoral fellowship of the Flemish Research Council. From 2020-2024, she was postdoctoral researcher on project Inventing Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe and editor of the of the correspondence of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. (https://suriano.huygens.knaw.nl/). Apart from the digital scholarly edition of Suriano’s letters, her most recent publications include a co-written article with Helmer Helmers on Dutch diplomacy in the seventeenth century, two journal articles: one on foreign powers influencing the first Italian newspapers, and one the role of cross-border printing privileges in the seventeenth-century Low Countries. As a Trinity Long Room Hub Fellow, she will examine how the Fagel library functioned as a tool of statecraft from the Fagel regent family in the eighteenth century. Drawing on recent digitization and cataloguing projects, the proposed research use book historical methods to bring the library into dialogue with the Fagel Archives in The Hague and to study how it was used for political education, referencing and networking. Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub