Karin van Leeuwen (C.W.)

Karin van Leeuwen (1981) is associate professor in European political history at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS), where she also is programme director of the European Studies Bachelor and co-initiated and co-leads the Law & History research network.

Karin holds a PhD from the Radboud University Nijmegen (2013), and MA degrees from the University of Groningen (History) and the Georg August Universität Göttingen/Uniwersytet Jagielloński Kraków (Euroculture). She previously worked in various teaching and research positions at the University of Amsterdam, at the University of Copenhagen and at the Huygens Institute of Netherlands History.

As a researcher, Karin is mostly interested in how modern European politics is shaped in interaction with law and legal practices – an interest that resulted in projects and publications on for example international law in and around the League of Nations (Cambridge Handbook on the League of Nations and International Law, co-edited with Haakon Ikonomou and Morten Rasmussen, 2026); constitutionalization of EU law (Blazing a trail: the Netherlands and European Law, 2026); and Dutch constitutional reform (Uit het spoor van Thorbecke, Boom Amsterdam 2013).

Her current research agenda focuses on historicizing the judicialization of politics in Europe. Building on amongst others an NWO XS grant, this agenda zooms in on the alleged shift of power away from legislatures and towards courts and judicial bodies during the 20th century. Now that the democratic consequences of this shift are ever more disputed, the history of this shift, and of the underlying emergence of legal expertise, practices and expectations, needs further consideration.

Apart from these main interests, ongoing projects also include publications on the history of socialism in the Netherlands (with Naomi Woltring), as well as on the (legal) history of European integration.