People
Dr Arthur der Weduwen
Arthur der Weduwen is Principal Investigator of the COMLAWEU project, and is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director and Project Manager of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He specialises in the history of communication, printing and the book trade, early modern politics and law, and the history of the Netherlands. He is the author of over thirty articles and essays and six books in these fields, including Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017), The Bookshop of the World. Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (co-authored with Andrew Pettegree, Yale University Press, 2019), The Library, A Fragile History (also with Andrew Pettegree, Profile, 2021) and, most recently, State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age (Oxford UP, 2023).
Within the COMLAWEU project, Arthur is tasked with providing a European synthesis of the project’s overall findings, and as such supports each of the six principal case studies undertaken by the project’s members. He also continues to build on his earlier work on state communication in the Dutch Republic, and is expanding his expertise of British, Southern Netherlandish and German state communication.
Dr Barnaby Cullen
Barnaby Cullen is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with the COMLAWEU project. He completed his PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2024, in which he explored printed news media across the Baltic Sea Region during the seventeenth century from a comparative, transnational perspective.
His other research interests include the Scandinavian and Baltic book trades, the public sphere, and the relationship between print and politics. His publications include ‘A Nordic Press The Development of Printing in Scandinavia and the Baltic States before 1700 from a European Perspective’ (co-written with Arthur der Weduwen), and a forthcoming co-edited volume on publishers in early modern Europe, including an article on early modern Swedish publishers. He has also worked for the Universal Short Title Catalogue since 2019, and is involved in advancing the project’s Swedish, Danish, Latvian, Lithuanian, German and Prussian data.
Within the COMLAWEU project, Barnaby conducts research on the communication of the law across the regions of Scandinavia, the Baltic and northern Germany. His work places particular focus on the absolutist Scandinavian kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark-Norway, and explores how official information was disseminated across their linguistically and culturally diverse empires.
Dr Christophe Gillain
Christophe Gillain is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with the COMLAWEU project. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2023, in which he examined transnational networks of rebellion in seventeenth-century France.
His research interests broadly focus on the political culture of early modern France and Europe, He is especially interested in the history of communication and mobility, and the ways in which political authority developed. He has recently co-edited (with Dr Annalisa Nicholson) a Special Issue of the journal Renaissance Studies, ‘Innovation and Exile in the Early Modern World’. He is currently working on his first monograph, tentatively entitled Transnational Rebellion in Bourbon France: Exile, Mobility, and the Making of the Absolutist State, 1630-1661.
Within the COMLAWEU project his research covers France. In particular, his work investigates similarities and differences in how authorities communicated the law not only in Paris, but in provincial cities such as Lyon and Aix-en-Provence, as well as in peripheral regions like Flanders and Lorraine.
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Dr Laura Incollingo
Laura Incollingo is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with the COMLAWEU project. Her first book, titled Political engagement and popular print in Spanish Naples (1503-1707), was published by Brill in 2024. Her research interests cover the history of popular culture and popular print, as well as the study of information culture in Italy, particularly Southern Italy, during the early modern period. She is also interested in the history of communication between state and eitizen, particularly the intersections between orality and written culture.
Within the COMLAWEU project her research focuses on Italy, especially the cities of Florence, Bologna and Naples. She will also look at Spain, with the underlying question of which similarities and differences can be found in how the Spanish authorities communicated with their subjects in their various domains.
Pawel Pietrowcew
Pawel Pietrowcew is a PhD candidate with the COMLAWEU project. He is interested in the social history of the early modern period. His two dissertations at the University of Warsaw were devoted to historical demography. In them, he investigated how church or military regulations influenced the sexual life of the population. His attention is particularly focused on the anti-trinitarian group of Polish Brethren. He is interested in their prosopography, contacts with other denominations and the position of women. Pawel is currently preparing a critical edition of the political speeches of the anti-trinitarian politician Andreas Moscorovius (ca. 1595 – ca. 1650).
For the COMLAWEU project, he is responsible for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In particular, he would like to examine citizens’ efforts to acquire legal knowledge in this territorially vast, nobility-dominated, non-bureaucratic, multicultural state with a long-lived manuscript culture.
Demi van Breukelen
Demi van Breukelen is a PhD candidate with the COMLAWEU project. She is widely interested in the socio-cultural history of the Netherlands in the early modern and modern periods, including the history of media and communication, and (micro)histories of everyday life. In her Research Master’s thesis (Utrecht University, 2025), she explored the use of printed administrative paperwork – such as forms, lists, and receipts – in the maritime sector of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.
Within the COMLAWEU project, her research focuses on the role of administrative paperwork in the communication and enforcement of the law, with a particular focus on the Dutch Republic.
Zina Gharakhani
Zina Gharakhani is a PhD candidate with the COMLAWEU project. She is interested in the history and development of communication in the early modern period. Her undergraduate dissertation at the University of Oxford focused on the growth of erudition and source criticism within the sixteenth century’s religious debates. Her MLitt dissertation at the University of St. Andrews delved into the Habsburg dynasty and the importance of people-politics in the aftermath of the Battle at Mohács (1526).
Within the COMLAWEU project, she is responsible for the Central European territories under Habsburg governance. Her research will explore Habsburg print culture between c. 1526-1683, focusing on how the dynasty approached the multilingual nature of its subjects when communicating the law.
Catherine Statchen
Catherine Statchen is an undergraduate research assistant with the COMLAWEU project. She is currently in her second year of a degree in Modern History and International Relations, and is the recipient of a four-year American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Scholarship for Emerging Advocates. She has been developing her interest in the history of the communication of the law, along with the wider political and legal landscape of France throughout the early modern period.
Within the COMLAWEU project, she is responsible for cataloguing edicts and ordinances from several regions around France, including Aix-en-Provence and Lyon, as well as providing general support for the project’s research on early modern France.