Alexandra de Pleijt is an Assistant Professor in Economic History at Wageningen University. Her research focuses on the fundamental historical question of what triggers radical economic transitions, today and in the past. She is interested in how education, skill formation and knowledge production feeds into processes of technological and economic change, and how these processes, in turn, affect socio-economic outcomes for societies as a whole as well as specific social groups (e.g. women, workers and regional populations). Her research is interdisciplinary, combining economic theory, computational tools and methods with historical research methods and in-depth explorations of archival material.