is one of the world’s greatest experts on the Dutch Golden Age, European Enlightenment and European Jewry. For 27 years he taught at University College London, where from 1985 he held the chair in Dutch History. Since 2001 he is Professor of Modern History at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His Dutch Republic (1995), Radical Enlightenment (2001) and Enlightenment Contested (2006) are generally considered to be masterpieces. At the moment he is working on the third part of his Enlightenment trilogy. In 2007 he was fellow at the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague. His essay in Nexus 50 deals with ‘Spinoza as an Educator’.