I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the History Department at Ghent University and an associate member of the Senior Common Room at Oriel College, Oxford.

I am a political theorist and historian of political thought, with a particular commitment to recovering early modern women's political thought and bringing it to bear on contemporary debates — about partisanship, ambition, inequality, and political inclusion, among others.

My first book Partisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women's Thought, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in July 2026.  It 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. Mary Astell and Catharine Macaulay grasped both the benefits of partisanship for those formally excluded from politics — a mechanism their male contemporaries overlooked — and the dangers of the political virtues, like reasonableness, politeness, and compromise, that those men advocated to bridle it.

I am currently working on a second book project, which recovers an early modern tradition of "ambitious feminism" to intervene in contemporary debates about ambition and (in)equality. A paper from this project is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science. With Mary Jo MacDonald (University of Jyväskylä), I am also working on a project on the conservative origins of feminism, recovering the neglected phenomenon of early modern Tory feminism.

I obtained my DPhil in Politics at the University of Oxford in 2023, where I was the inaugural David N. Lyon Scholar at Oriel College. I previously obtained an MPhil in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews (2019) and a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Utrecht (2016). My doctoral work was 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