i
Curriculum Vitae
Martin P.M. Weiss was bom in Hanover, Germany, in 1985. He grew up bilingually and spent
many weeks every year attending summer schools, travelling and visiting friends in England,
where his grandparents lived.
After having completed secondary school in Germany in 2003, he started studying physics at
RWTH Aachen University and was awarded a scholarship by the German National Academic
Foundation (Studienstiftung). Having completed his Vordiplom and having learnt Dutch, an
Erasmus Mundus scholarship enabled him to spend a year at Utrecht University in 2005.
There he subsequently enrolled in the Masters programme “History and Philosophy of
Science”. In addition to his studies he completed an internship at the archives of the
Deutsches Museum in Munich and went on study trips to Iran and Russia. In 2008 he
graduated cum laude with a thesis on the history of polytechnical museums in the GDR. For
his research he travelled widely through eastern Germany.
Having completed his studies he was offered a job as researcher at Leiden University and
started work on his PhD on the history of Teylers Museum in Haarlem in the nineteenth
century. In addition to his research he initiated and organised a conference on the public role
of Dutch collections in the nineteenth century and was guest-editor of a special edition of the
Dutch scholarly journal De Negentiende Eeuw on the same topic. This was published in 2010
under the title Druk bekeken.
He presented the findings of his PhD-research at conferences in the Netherlands as well as
abroad, in Montréal, Aberdeen, Leeds, Philadelphia and Kassel. This resulted in two scholarly
articles currently in print, as well as short contributions to the magazine for friends and
visitors of Teylers Museum. He was also a member of the Huizinga Institute, the national
Dutch research network for Cultural History, and attended many of the courses and master
classes offered for members. At Leiden University he helped devise and teach a seminar
“Science and the Public” for graduate students.
As from October 2013, he is a trainee at the European Commission in Brussels.