Dr. Jessica E.C. Dijkman

Jessica Dijkman (1960) is an associate professor in economic and social history at Utrecht University. After a career in public administration, she wrote a dissertation on commodity market institutions in medieval Holland which she defended in 2010. She is currently the scientific director of the N.W. Posthumus Institute, the Dutch-Flemish research school for economic and social history.

Research summary

Dijkman’s research focuses on the way in which societies in late medieval and early modern Europe coped with food crises and famines. She is one of the co-authors of Van Bavel et al., Disasters and History: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies (CUP: Cambridge 2020) and she is currently co-investigator in the project ‘The Politics of the English grain trade 1314-1815’.  

Keywords

Famines and food crises, food provisioning, premodern markets, disasters