Elwin Hofman is assistant professor of Cultural History and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Utrecht University. His research concerns the cultural and social history of Europe since the eighteenth century, with a special focus on crime, emotions, sexuality, selfhood and psychology. His current research project, , focuses on the cultural history of criminal interrogation and the circulation of psychological knowledge. He studies the rise of 'psychological' techniques in criminal interrogations in Western Europe since the late eighteenth century.
His first book, Trials of the Self: Murder, Mayhem and the Remaking of the Mind, 1750-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2021) uses Belgian criminal trial records and other sources to highlight how criminal justice has transformed ideas and practices of the self among common people. Publications related to this project have appeared in a.o. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, Journal of Religious History and History of the Human Sciences. He has also published on the history of gossip, edited a popular history of the eighteenth century and co-edited popular volumes on the history of homosexuality and the history of sex work in Belgium.
In recent years, he has taught classes and research seminars at various institutions, on public history, cultural history and the history of sexuality. He is an editor of Jaarboek De Achttiende Eeuw, the journal of the Dutch-Belgian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and a member of the editorial board of The Low Countries. He has been a visiting scholar at The University of Chicago, at New York University, at the Universit茅 Paris 1 Panth茅on-Sorbonne and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.