About the project
How did economics emerge as a discipline, and what kinds of knowledge practices made this possible? In the early eighteenth century, not only markets but also the ways in which economic value, risk and speculation were imagined, transformed. For this fellowship I will explore how theatrical practices, visual metaphors and material objects played a constitutive role in that transformation, and how they affected economics as a discipline.

Focusing on the stock market crisis of 1720, the project examines how theatrical and performative practices, including theatrical metaphors, the magic lantern and interactions with decorative art objects, shaped economic thinking. Central to the research is a folio-sized book titled Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid, a monumental compilation of satirical prints, plays and pamphlets depicting a crisis. Notably, theatrical tropes from the book also travelled to bubble objects, such as decorated drinking glasses, tobacco boxes and porcelain plates, thereby entering new forms of embodied knowledge production. Rather than treating the book and related objects as commentary, or as the outcome of economic change or thought, the project approaches them as active sites of economic knowledge production. Drawing on theatrical repertoires, including commedia dell’arte and visual devices such as the magic lantern, these materials framed economic behaviour in ways that anticipated later understandings of speculation, and helped shape influential crisis narratives and economic concepts within the discipline of economics.

By foregrounding visual and material culture, I aim to analyse how concepts that would become central to economic thought took shape outside formal economic treatises. Theatricality, illusion and performance were not decorative elements but epistemic tools through which economic thought and economic realities were produced. In doing so, the project contributes to current debates in the history of science (but also to theatre history and history of economics), arguing for a more inclusive account of how economic knowledge was produced.

About the researcher
I am an external PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, where I am completing my dissertation Bubble Objects: Producing the Dutch Stock Market Crisis of 1720, to be defended in 2026. My research brings together theatre studies, cultural history and the history of science, with a particular emphasis on visual and material culture. Through a series of research fellowships, I have worked at institutions including the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz and the Freie Universität Berlin. Working as a dramaturg and researcher, I enjoy exploring research questions from an artistic and an academic perspective and collaborate cross-disciplinary to find answers. My recent work includes an artist–researcher-in-residence fellowship at the Special Collections of the Radboud University Nijmegen and Maastricht University, performance lectures with the artist Toon Fibbe on the intertwinements of theatre and economy, and the founding of a German–Dutch Theatre and Economy research collaboration where we combine artistic and academic research.