Brand, Prof Dr A.J. (Hanno)

Areas of specialisation

History of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, urban elites, court and court culture, Hanseatic League, Frisian stadholders, maritime history of Friesland.

Biografy

Hanno Brand (Gouda 1959) studied history of the Middle Ages in Leiden and Ghent (Belgium). In 1986, he worked as a PhD student and lecturer at the Department of Medieval History at Leiden University. This was followed in 1989 by an appointment at Ghent University as lecturer and researcher. Between 1995 and 2001, he worked as a postdoc and project leader at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Paris. His research there focused on the Burgundian court in the fifteenth century. In 2001, he moved to the University of Groningen, where he was appointed lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Medieval History. There, he headed the Hanseatic Study Centre and conducted research on the relations between the Netherlands and the Hanseatic League in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Brand's dissertation On power and supremacy. Urban elites in Leiden 1420-1510 (Over macht en overwicht. Stedelijke elites in Leiden 1420-1510) appeared in 2006. He published over seventy articles in six languages. He was editor-in-chief of a dozen collections and one of the editors of the three-volume archive inventory Baltic Connections (2007).

In 2009, he joined the Fryske Akademy and started there as head of the history department. Since then, his research has focused on the Frisian stadholders and Frisian maritime history in the early modern period. After a short interim period, he was Managing Director of the Fryske Akademy from December 2013 until January 2018. From 2017 to 2022, Brand was associate professor of ‘Friesland in the trade networks of pre-industrial Europe (1000-1800)’ on behalf of the Fryske Akademy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen (RUG).