About the Project Lead
For Dustin M. Neighbors, history has never been something that belongs only in archives or academic journals. History has always been a living, breathing force—something that shapes people’s lives, identities, and relationships with the world around them. Growing up in the American South, he learned early that history is not just something found in books—it lives in the places, the objects, and the quiet traces people leave behind. This sense of history as something felt, rather than merely studied, has guided him ever since. Dustin’s historical curiosity eventually carried him across the Atlantic, where he built a career uncovering the hidden stories of early modern Europe.
Today, Dustin is a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie fellow at the University of Gothenburg and the principal researcher of HERLAND, an EU‑funded project exploring how women in early modern Northern Europe engaged with nature, resources, and animals. HERLAND is built on a simple, but transformative idea: women’s environmental experiences mattered—and they shaped families, communities, and political cultures in ways that still resonate. The project grew out of years of research in archives, palaces, museums, and landscapes, and from Dustin’s conviction that women’s experiences with natural environments, animals, and resources have long been overlooked—even though they were central to everyday life.
Dustin's commitment to public history grew alongside his academic work. As a young lecturer, he discovered that the classroom was not just a place to transmit knowledge, but a space where history becomes meaningful. Students asked questions that pushed him to think differently; they connected with stories of queens, hunters, and everyday women in ways that revealed the emotional and human dimensions of the past. Teaching became a way to make history accessible, to give voice to people who had been overlooked, and to show students that the past is not distant—it is alive in the present.
During his PhD at the University of York, Dustin explored how Queen Elizabeth I of England used travel, ritual, and performance to exercise political power. He realised that women were never confined to the private sphere as neatly as traditional narratives suggest. They influenced people, moved, travelled, hunted, managed estates, wrote letters, shaped policy, and negotiated authority in ways that blurred the boundaries between household and landscape.
From there, his research expanded across Europe. Dustin examined the politics of privacy at courts, the meanings of colour and clothing, and the multisensory worlds of hunting. He worked for Historic Royal Palaces in the UK, contributed to an interdisciplinary team as fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, produced new research and gain new skills through the Fashion History Lab at Aalto University, fostered research collaborations as a team member of the “Household and Environmental Studies” network with the Centre for Research on Courts and Residences at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and served as project coordinator for Colour4CRAFTS, a major EU‑Horizon consortium project based at the University Helsinki. In each role, he found ways to bring history to wider audiences—through museum collaborations, digital storytelling, podcasts, public lectures, and student-centred teaching that encouraged curiosity and critical thinking. Dustin has also published widely on female power, hunting, court culture, and political performance, and Queen Christina of Sweden.
Along the way, Dustin has developed a reputation for bringing together archival research, material culture, digital methods, and broader interdisciplinary perspectives—an approach that now sits at the heart of HERLAND. The project’s public-facing dimension is central: HERLAND aims to make these histories visible not only to scholars but to communities, heritage organisations, and anyone interested in the lived experiences of people across time.
At the heart of everything he does—research, teaching, public engagement—is a belief that history is a shared resource. The past belongs to everyone. HERLAND reflects that belief: an effort to bring women’s environmental experiences back into view, to connect past and present, and to show how the stories of early modern women can help us think differently about sustainability, gender, and our own relationship with the natural world.
In his personal life, Dustin loves to travel and explore historical places, read books, watch historical dramas, listen to music, hunt for the best food experiences, spend time with his partner and with his service dog, Zappa.
