I am an FWO postdoctoral research fellow in history at Ghent University.

I'm primarily a historian of political thought, and am especially interested in, and committed to, recovering early modern women’s political thought. I aim to bring their perspectives to bear on contemporary political concerns including, but also beyond those of gender and feminism.

My book project, Partisan Virtue, under contract with Oxford University Press, recovers an ethics of partisanship from the lives and works of eighteenth-century women thinkers, for whom partisanship offered an unexpected but essential means to political inclusion. They appreciated both the benefits of partisanship as a mechanism of political inclusion for those formally excluded from politics––a mechanism their male contemporaries ignored––and the dangers of the political virtues like reasonableness, politeness, and compromise, these men advocated to bridle partisanship.

In 2023 I obtained my DPhil (PhD) in Politics at the University of Oxford, where I was the inaugural David N. Lyon Scholar at Oriel College. I previously obtained an M.Phil. in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews (2019) and a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Utrecht (2016). My doctoral work has been supported by, among others, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Oriel College, St Catherine's College, and the Prins Bernhard Cultural Foundation.

I am a co-founder of the Women in History of Political Thought (WHPT) network.

Please feel free to contact me at geertje [dot] bol [at] ugent.be