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