Rombert Stapel (1983) studied Medieval History at Leiden University. He graduated in 2008 on a prosopographical study of the priest-brethren of the Teutonic Order in the Utrecht bailiwick (1350-1600). He then started working on a PhD dissertation at Leiden University and the Fryske Akademy (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) concerning a late fifteenth-century Middle Dutch chronicle of the Teutonic Order, the Croniken van der Duytscher Oirden or Jüngere Hochmeisterchronik, which became an influential text in the Baltic region in the sixteenth century. He defended his thesis, cum laude, on January 25th 2017.
He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher for the project Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500-2000 and the joined Huygens ING, Meertens Instituut, and IISH program The Impact of Circulation.
In the last few years, he has been studying labour relations in various parts of the world (including the history of self-employment), medieval and early modern coin production, and the circulation of knowledge, goods, and people in the world. He is particularly interested in the spatial humanities: one project aims to create linked open data gazetteers of historical place names, and the other is a GIS map of late medieval administrative-judicial units in the Low Countries (heerlijkheden) by using hearth taxes, which aims to replace or at least update the Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland by A.A. Beekman.