New Netherland Institute

Meet this year's Fulbright - New Netherland Research Fellow!

Johan Visser, a PhD Candidate at Leiden University, is this year's Fulbright-NNRC scholar. He is working on a project entitled Feeding the Atlantic: Computational Reading of Scarcity and Paradise in the Dutch Atlantic World, which looks at how descriptions of New Netherland as an agricultural paradise conflicted with actual experiences of food scarcity for many who lived in the colony.

The New Netherland Institute was honored to be included in the celebration for the Alice P. Kenney Endowed Fund at the Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region () in Albany on Wednesday. We are grateful to Marjorie Kenney for her generosity and to the Community Foundation for administering grants from the Kenney Endowed Fund.

It is a wonderful coincidence that the Community Foundation should disperse the first grants from the Alice P. Kenney Fund at the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution as Alice (who, unfortunately, died much too young in 1985) was one of the foremost historians of Albany in and around the period of the Revolution. Some of her work on the subject can be found in "The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley" (1969) and "Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York" (1975). If you would like to read more about Alice P. Kenney and her mother, Marjorie Kenney, Paul Grondahl has written a nice piece about them for the Albany Times Union, which you can find here: https://eedition.timesunion.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=2f065ee7-9bcb-4fed-a843-a9eaa201f254&share=true.

We look forward to honoring Alice Kenney's legacy with further work on New Netherland.

Reminder: join us for our next Live from New Amsterdam on Thursday, May 28 at noon. Deborah Hamer will speak with Anna Danziger Halperin, the Director of the Jean Margo Reid Center for Women's History at The New York Historical, about the new exhibition Revolutionary Women. For more information and to register, visit https://www.nyhistory.org/programs/live-from-new-amsterdam-revolutionary-women?date=2026-05-28

Image: John Watson, Anna Van Rensselaer Schuyler (1719-1791). From the Collection of New York Historical.

Meet NNI's Third 2026 Wendell Fellow!

Lisa Fludd-Smith is co-founder and Deputy Executive Director of the African American Archive of Columbia County. She will be working on "Write My Name in the Book of Life," a book about the Black history of the Hudson Valley in the 17th through 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in exploring the relationships between Dutch settlers and the people they enslaved and then how the two groups interacted after manumission.

Join us for our next Live from New Amsterdam on Thursday, May 28 at noon. Deborah Hamer will speak with Anna Danziger Halperin, the Director of the Jean Margo Reid Center for Women's History at The New York Historical, about the new exhibition Revolutionary Women. For more information and to register, visit https://www.nyhistory.org/programs/live-from-new-amsterdam-revolutionary-women?date=2026-05-28

Join the on Tuesday, June 9th at noon for an online talk by Dr. Erin Kramer (Trinity University) about her new book The Ancient House: Constructing Community in the Seventeenth-Century New York Borderlands. The book explores the relationships between the Dutch and Haudenosaunee and Albany's significance as the site where the two groups met and negotiated their relationships. Event is free, but registration is required. For more information, visit https://nyslibrary.libcal.com/event/16518635

Meet the second of our three 2026 Wendell Fellows!

Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa. He will be working on a project entitled, Holy War Rhetoric in Early North America, 1680-1765, which explores the use of the rhetoric of religious violence and apocalypticism in the context of warfare in Imperial North America. The Wendell Grant will give him time to explore sermons written and delivered in Dutch Reformed Churches in the Hudson River Valley. Often ignored because they were Dutch speaking in the English era, these church sermons show the continued importance of the Reformed Church after 1664.

Meet the first of our three 2026 Wendell Fellows.

Andrea Mosterman (University of New Orleans) will be working on "A Marvelous Foreshadowing": New Amsterdam and the Dutch Role in Promoting the Early American Slave Trade." She'll be researching the voyage of the Dutch slave ship Gideon in 1663-1664 and the central role of New Amsterdam in the early North American slave trade.

In New York and looking for something to do over the weekend? On Saturday May 9th at 2pm Dr. Elisabeth Paling Funk will be speaking in Tarrytown about her book, The Dutch World of Washington Irving (part of the New Netherland Institute's book series with Cornell University Press). The venue, Christ Church, is the church that Irving attended in his lifetime and where his funeral service was held. For more information, visit https://www.thehistoricalsociety.net/washington-irving-folk-historian-of-the-hudson-valley/
Image: Interior of Christ Church, Tarrytown, New York

Meet NNI's Exploring Dutch Participation in the American Revolution Fellow!

Dr. Dirk Alkemade is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. As the new NNI-fellow, he will focus on the history and activities of the Holland Land Company. Founded in 1795 by a group of Amsterdam bankers, the company was created to oversee the purchase of large tracts of land in the western regions of Philadelphia and New York. In addition, Dirk will work on several publications and projects related to Dutch connections to the American Revolution and the early American Republic.

Dirk Alkemade earned his PhD from Leiden University with a dissertation on Pieter Vreede and democratic radicalism during the Dutch Revolution. The study was later published in Dutch by Koninklijke Boom Uitgevers in Amsterdam. In 2021, he received the NNI–Fulbright Scholarship, which enabled him to conduct research on Dutch migrants during the revolutionary era at the New Netherland Research Center in Albany.

We are thrilled to have Dirk working on this project.