Dr Tina van der Vlies is assistant professor of history and education at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a member of the scientific advisory board of the Dutch National Museum of Education. For her new research project 'Why School History Matters. Public Discourses on the Purposes of History Education, 1920-2020', funded by the Dutch Research Council, she is affiliated with the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education (UK).

Van der Vlies studied history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and education at Leiden University, both cum laude. During her studies, she taught history in high school and gave tours in the Dutch National Museum of Education. The Dutch Research Council funded her PhD research on the perpetuation of national narratives in English and Dutch history textbooks, 1920 – 2010. She wrote about the more hidden ways of perpetuation by pointing out how narratives in textbooks overlapped and interfused. Her book Echoing Events shows how textbook authors narrated different histories as ‘echoing events’ by interpreting them in the same way and by using the same combinations of historical analogies. Her research revealed widespread schemata and frames of references in the narration of national history, and complemented James Wertsch’ theory on narrative templates.