Klamer's Graduate Students, Past and Present

    "Conversations will only be sustained if they frequently receive new impulses. To that end we need to train people to join the conversation and take over ... Think of graduate teaching as a community service and new recruits as our link to the future — a good reason for treating young scholars well."
— Arjo Klamer from Speaking of Economics


J. Aldo Do Carmo, Jr.

After completing his Master's thesis on "Collaboration among Museums" with Arjo Klamer, J. Aldo Do Carmo is continuing with PhD research on "Evaluation of Cultural Initiatives" where he will discuss a logical model of cultural-value creation. He intends to propose a systematic method to evaluate the effectiveness of cultural and artistic production, comparing purposes to achievements, investigating the outputs (short-term results) and outcomes (long-term changes or impacts) in the cultural and social milieus.

He holds a Master's degree in Cultural Management from University of Bologna (Italy), and is trained in Strategic Planning, Marketing and Business Management. Do Carmo also holds a degree in geology from Universidade de Säo Paulo (Brazil), and has 15 years of corporate working experience.


Lili Jiang
Lili Jiang is currently working with Arjo Klamer as supervisor for her PhD on art economics at the Faculty of History and Arts at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on exploring the relationship between the cultural and market values of art, and comparing the Chinese and Dutch art markets from an artistic perspective.

She holds a Master Degree of Art in Art History from Chongqing University (China) and an undergraduate degree in Visual Painting from Xi'an Jiaotong University (China). She has experience in both the practical and theoretical fields.


Irene van Staveren
Irene van Staveren is an early graduate student of Klamer's career with respect to supervising and promoting students. She completed her PhD in 1999 with the thesis, "Caring for Economics - An Aristotelian Perspective." She is currently Professor of the Special Chair of Economics and Christian Ethics at Radboud University Nijmegen. Other areas of expertise include feminist economics, development economics, labour market economics and regional economics.

Among works Van Stavaren and Klamer have co-authored are 'Geven is geen ruilen. De gift en de economische wetenschap' in Aafke Komter (ed.) Het Geschenk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997, pp. 108-120) and 'Zorg als Economisch Concept' in Jaarboek Emancipatie (Den Haag, Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, 1999, pp. 20-25).

Prof. van Staveren earned a Master's degree in economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1988. A CV (current as of 2009) is available here: < Irene van Staveren, Curriculum Vitae >


Claudine de With
Trained as an art historian, Claudine de With is currently writing with Klamer as her advisor a PhD thesis at the Faculty of History and Arts at Erasmus University. Her thesis focuses on the tension between art and money from the perspective of the visual artist. Her research studies in particular treatises on the theory of art and monographs written by artists and art critics as sources for reconstructing the ideas of artists and money. Her interests are the interconnections between painting and the 'sister arts': literature, film, rhetoric and fashion, as well as the history of ideas.

Ms. de With holds a degree in Art History from the University of Leiden.





Paul Teule
Paul Teule is currently working on a dissertation on the (alternative) measures of societal progress, focusing on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other conventional statistics. Generally recognized as a poor measure of well-being, or even economic activity, GDP (growth) is still associated with progress and national prestige. Currently, the European Commission, as well as the French government are trying to change this. Simultaneously, many competitors (e.g. footprints, green GDP, Happy Planet Index), in a quest for public recognition, seek to supplement or even replace GDP. Paul Teule will try and make sense of it all.

He holds degrees in Economics (BSc) and Philosophy (MA / drs., cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam. He is also a freelance researcher and has regularly contributed articles to a number of Dutch and Belgian media.


Simon Goudsmit
After earning an MBA from Harvard (1950) most of Simon Goudsmit's career was in management. But as a child he had devoured history and noticed that most books on currency were about coins and banknotes rather than the long learning process beginning with the Sumerians that powered the use of money. His Limits of Money (2004), completed under the supervision of Prof. Klamer, thus starts with history and the hard knocks that accompanied the evolution of money from coins to a virtual medium.

Of the many aspects of Klamer's coaching two impressed him most: his dialectic skill and his interpretation of the "oikos" as basic link to economic thinking. Goudsmit has been working on a book which takes this second ingredient, which he calls "bedrock" (of societies) to restore individual identity to matters that are shared, like education and health care. As with many social revolutions, he says, "it takes time before the implications are accepted."


Anna Mignosa
Anna Mignosa completed her PhD in 2005 with the publication of To Preserve or not to Preserve? Economic dilemmas in the cases of Sicilian and Scottish cultural heritage. After earning her undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Catania, she collaborated in a research project, "The Administration of Cultural Heritage in Sicily." She moved to the Netherlands in 1999 to write her graduate thesis under the supervision of Prof. Klamer, chair of Economics of Art and Culture at Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

Dr. Mignosa is currently a Cultural Economist at the University of Catania as well as an occasional instructor at Academia Vitae, a new university founded by Klamer in Deventer, the Netherlands.

Olav Velthuis
Olav Velthuis
photo: susan b. macdonald
Economic sociologist Olav Velthuis's research interests include sociology of the arts, cultural sociology, art theory, and the economics of art and culture. With Arjo Klamer as his advisor, he received his PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in June 2002. In his dissertation, Talking Prices: Contemporary Art, Commercial Galleries, and the Construction of Value, he studied the market for contemporary art in New York and Amsterdam.

Klamer and Velthuis have co-authored several works, including "Wijzigingen in het Nederlandse kansspelbeleid" and "Cultureel ondernemerschap - wat is dat eigenlijk?"

Velthuis is the recipient of a TALENT fellowship, a post-doctoral award sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, New York. He holds degrees in Art History and Economics from the University of Amsterdam and studied Sociology at Princeton University.

Wilfred Dolfsma in 1999
Wilfred Dolfsma
Wilfred Dolfsma received his PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam. From 1994 to 1998, Dolfsma worked with Arjo Klamer as a research assistant in the department of Economics of Art and Culture at Erasmus. Klamer has since cited Dolfsma from, among other works, "The Social Construction of Value" (European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 1997, v.3: pp 400-16) and Valuing Pop Music: Institutions, VALUES and Economics (1999 Delft: Eburon).

Dolfsma won the 2001 Helen Potter Award, presented each year to a promising scholar of social economics and author of the best article in the Review of Social Economy for "Metaphors of Knowledge in Economics." He is presently assistant professor at the Rotterdam School of Management and associate professor at the International Institute of Infonomics, a division of University of Maastricht).


Lusy Petrova

With Klamer as her advisor, Lyudmila Petrova was awarded an MA in Cultural Economics and Cultural Entrepreneurship at the Faculty of History and Arts at Erasmus University in 2005. Her thesis, How Creativity Copes with Money, explored the consequences of interactions between visual artists, financial support, and creativity motivation. Her research interests include the economics of art and culture, and different ways to motivate creativity in and support artists.

She holds a degree in Economics from the University of Economics (Varna, Bulgaria) and a degree in Cultural History of the Arts from the New Bulgarian University (Sofia, Bulgaria). Drs. Petrova is currently pursuing a PhD. and is an instructor at Academia Vitae, a new university founded by Klamer in Deventer, the Netherlands.


Erwin Dekker is currently working on his Ph.D. about Modernism in Economics. This thesis will explore the similarities between artistic movements in the first half of the twentieth century and the economic theories of that period.

He holds an MSc degree in Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and holds undergraduate degrees in Economics and Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently working as lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.