Historian Eric Ruijssenaars is available for public lectures Fall and Winter
2011/2012.

Dr. Ruijssenaars, the New Netherland Research Center’s first Senior Scholar
in Residence, is the founder of Dutch Archives, a historical research firm
in Leiden, the Netherlands. Although a specialist in the history of Russia
and the Netherlands, he is also a scholar of the Brontë sisters in Brussels
and has published two books on the subject. Currently he is researching the
life of Abraham Staats.

In 1642, Abraham Staats arrived in the Dutch colony of New Netherland to
serve as a surgeon on patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s vast estate,
Rensselaerswijck, now part of Albany and Rensselaer counties. Over the
course of his life, Staats became a magistrate of the court, a captain of
the burgher guard, the owner of a sloop that made regular trips to New
Amsterdam (New York City), and an Indian language translator. Something of
an oddity in rough-and-tumble New Netherland, he remained a very respectable
man and was, for that reason, regularly called on to mediate disputes
between his less respectable and more litigious neighbors.

The New Netherland Research Center is a partnership of the New Netherland
Institute and the New York State Office of Cultural Education, which is
comprised of the State Library, the State Archives, the State Museum, and
the Office of Educational Television and Public Broadcasting. The NNRC
promotes and supports both New Netherland scholarship and educational
opportunities for teachers, students, and the public. It continues and
extends the work of the New York State Library's New Netherland Project,
which since 1974 has preserved, transcribed, translated, and published 17th
century documents in order to make the history of the Dutch colonial
presence in North America more broadly accessible for study.

For more information or to schedule a presentation, contact Ann Pfau,
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