Irene van Renswoude

Irene van Renswoude (born 1967) is professor by special appointment of Manuscripts and Cultural History, with a focus on the Middle Ages (500–1500), at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Humanities.

She holds the Herman de la Fontaine Verwey Chair, a position established on behalf of the National Library of the Netherlands.

Career
Under Mayke de Jong, she studied Language and Culture Studies in Utrecht, specialising in medieval history and literature. On 6 June 2011 she was awarded a PhD (cum laude) for her thesis entitled ''Licence to speak. The rhetoric of free speech in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages''. In addition, she has published on such subjects as censorship, debate and cultural constructions of identity. From 2011 she worked at the Huygens ING as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2015, she was awarded, together with Mariken Teeuwen, funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for a project titled The Art of Reasoning: Techniques of Scientific Argumentation in the Medieval Latin West (c. 400- c. 1400). This project ran from June 2016 to June 2020.

Honours
She received the Praemium Erasmianum Research Award in 2012 for her dissertation. and the Heineken Young Scientist Award for History in 2014