Let Curiosity Lead the Way

By Fayrouz Gomaa & Rosanne Vreugdenhil

Looking back on her career as a historian, Liesbeth van de Grift can identify a common thread that brought her to where she is now. Yet, when she first finished her Master’s programme, she did not have a specific path planned towards an academic career: “I just chose to do whatever I enjoyed most at that time and that brought me here,” she says.

After graduating from her MA programme in 2003, Van de Grift started working as a project leader at the Alfred Mozer-foundation, where she had done an internship during her Master’s programme. She organized workshops and youth gatherings for countries of the former Yugoslavia, in which participants discussed strategies on the transition to democracy and found a connection with the rest of Europe. After a few years, she started to miss engaging with history. Her job was mostly organizational, and the discussions surrounding the transition to democracy made her want to delve deeper into this theme historically. It was around this time that Ido de Haan approached her for a PhD position at Utrecht University. Because Van de Grift was interested in the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, she wondered how these countries transitioned to a new system after 1945. Realizing that learning three Eastern European languages was not the best way to go, she narrowed the topic of her doctoral thesis down to the post-1945 transition to communism in Soviet-occupied Europe, comparing East-Germany to Romania.

Initially, Van de Grift was not planning on continuing in academia. Yet, after listing the things she enjoyed most: reading, writing, doing research, travelling and teaching, she realized this was the clear profile of an academic. That is why she decided to send in a post-doc research proposal about the rural internal colonization of the Netherlands. Her proposal was accepted, and between 2011 and 2014 she worked on her research on internal colonization in interwar Europe, where attempts to build new communities on uninhabited areas were strengthened by a strong belief in progress.

This research brought her to environmental history, a broad and diverse historical genre. In her previous research, Van de Grift investigated what the emergence of nature and the environment on the political agenda meant for those who were invested in it. Who tried to get it on the political agenda and why did this lead to policy? Within the European Community in the 1970s, the consumer organizations appropriated this topic the most, which is why Van de Grift was interested in learning more about the role of these actors. In her current research, she analyzes the degree to which consumer organizations have contributed to greater citizen participation within the EU.

In retrospect, Van de Grift thinks that her relaxed attitude was key for her career; “there’s always something else you can do,” she says. To all the (RMA-)History students reading this, she would advise not to stay too focused on one clear goal in the choices you make. Making a step-by-step plan towards your doctoral thesis can be useful, but ambitions can lead to overly strategic choices. Make time for the things you like and enjoy learning about new subjects and other fields of history. According to Van de Grift, it’s more about curiosity on how the world works and about getting answers to the questions that interest you. More often than not, you are capable of much more than you realize!