I was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1962, where I graduated from high school in 1979. After receiving my first degrees at the University of Amsterdam, I moved to Canada, where I further specialized in Russian and European history. I received my Ph.D. in 1994 from McGill University in Montreal.

I then taught European and World History at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario until 2005. During this time I wrote two books, Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953, which was based on my dissertation, and The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948. In 2000, I was the recipient of Nipissing's annual prize for most outstanding teacher, and in 2003 I received its Research Achievement Prize.

I also received a doctoral grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a federal granting agency in Canada, by which same Council in 2004 I was awarded a three-year grant for research that led to my third scholarly monograph, The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys. My first two books studied the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin, whereas I have since moved to the study of the cultural encounter between Western Europeans and Russians in the Early Modern Age, even if I occasionally publish something on the Soviet Union even now (and on some other topics, too). An interview about my third book is linked to this website here: http://ir.uiowa.edu/history_nbih/47/. After the Struys project, which led to an additional series of articles, I wrote a biography (Moderniser of Russia) about a pivotal figure in the tsar's entourage in the Early Modern Age, Andrei Andreevich Vinius, son of an expatriate Dutch businessman. I simultaneously completed the first edition of my textbook A History of Russia and its Empire, which meanwhile (in 2018) has been issued in a new second edition. I then made a foray into Dutch (my mother tongue) for three books, one an annotated and edited retranslation into modern Dutch (from its hard-to-read--seventeenth-century Dutch and Gothic script--original version of 1676) of Jan Struys's Drie aanmerkelijke en rampspoedige Reysen. In commemoration of the 1917 Russian revolution, two works in Dutch with Amsterdam University Press were subsequently published (De Russisiche Revolutie and Revoljoetsija). Subsequently, I edited a collection of essays on daily life under Stalin (Life in Stalin's Soviet Union), for which I wrote the introduction and a piece on Soviet peasants. Undertaking this project seemed a sort of logical outcome (2008-2018) of my decade as chief editor of The Historian, a peer-reviewed journal of history. As such, I oversaw the publication of myriad articles and book reviews on a great variety of topics, from Korean, Afghan and Central-Asian history to the history of Early Modern England and Early America, US labor history and the history of the Cold War.

Recently, besides the essay collection, I have undertaken a few international collaborative projects: on Rembrandt's Professor Tulp with a group of gynecologists from Amsterdam (which will be published in English); on the rendition of the cityscape of Kazan in 1703 by Cornelis de Bruin with fellow scholars from the University of Kazan (which will be published in Russian by one of the publications issued under the auspices of St. Petersburg University); and I participated as Struys expert in a traveling international conference of artists from The Netherlands, the Russian Federation and Iran who have been inspired by Struys's enigmatic travel account (I wrote an essay for the exhibition catlog and was interviewe twice--once from Amsterdam and once from Isfahan-- on my view of Struys and his work by Skype; the exhibition moved throughout 2019 from Amsterdam to Isfahan to Samara on the Volga to Moscow).

Currently, I am working on two projects, one on the concept of Russia as an empire, and another on Dutch-Russian relations from the 1580s to 1725, both of which are intended to be published as books.