Nadine Akkerman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Leiden University in the Netherlands.^[1] Her published work has been concerned with the life and letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, and early modern espionage, and she has made a major contribution to studies of that Queen, the Thirty Years War, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, by revisiting and editing original manuscript sources and letters.^[2]

Career

Akkerman studied English Language and Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her 2008 PhD included a survey of the letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia. She has been a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and the University of Birmingham.^[3]

On 11 August 2016 Akkerman and Daniel Smith staged a production of The Masque of Queens at New College, Oxford.^[4]

Selected publications

• Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• 'Unlocking History through Automated Virtual Unfolding of Sealed Documents Imaged by X-ray Microtomography', Nature Communications, 12:1184 (2021), with Jana Dambrogio, Amanda Ghassaei et al.
• Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Courtly Rivals in the Hague: Elizabeth of Bohemia and Amalia van Solms (Venlo: VanSpijk/Rekafa, 2015).
• 'The Goddess of the Household: The Masquing Politics of Lucy Harington-Russell, Countess of Bedford', in Nadine Akkerman & Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
• The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, 3 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-2016)