Jacqueline Hylkema

Jacqueline Hylkema is an Assistant Professor of Cultural History at Leiden University College, part of Leiden University in The Hague. She also holds the position of Senior Scaliger Fellow at Leiden University Libraries' Scaliger Institute, where she is building a significant new Special Collection consisting of historical fakes and forgeries produced in the Dutch Republic between 1550 and 1800.

Dr. Hylkema completed her doctoral dissertation 'The Rhetoric of Illusion: Persuasion and Response in Forgery, the Arts and Other Deceptions (1600-1750)' at Leiden University in 2019. Her research focuses on the complex relationship between deception, art, and scholarship in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on forgery in early modern print culture in the Dutch Republic and Britain. She examines how forgeries were created, perceived, and responded to within their cultural contexts, revealing broader cultural negotiations surrounding concepts of reality, authenticity, and originality.

Her publications demonstrate a consistent analytical approach to historical deception cases, including The Originall of Idolatries (1624), Alexander Bendo's mountebank handbill (1676), George Psalmanazar's fabricated history of Formosa (1704), the Mary Toft rabbit-birth hoax (1726), and the Great Bottle Hoax (1749). These works reveal how creative forgeries without prototypes were woven into the fabric of reality and how they contributed to developing distinctions between fiction and scholarship.

• Shelby Cullom Davis Center Fellow, Spring 2026
• Senior Scaliger Fellow at Leiden University Libraries' Scaliger Institute

Through her scholarly work and collection-building efforts, Dr. Hylkema is establishing important infrastructure for the emerging field of forgery studies. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges cultural history, art history, intellectual history, and literary studies, providing valuable insights into how societies negotiate truth claims—a subject with significant contemporary relevance in our digital age of misinformation.