Professor and poet Esther Jansma dies aged 66

Dendrochronology is a dating technique that exploits the annual growth increments of trees to provide a precise estimate of the age (or period since formation) of a wood sample. In 2007, Esther Jansma (1958) became a Distinguished Professor of this subject at the Faculty of Geosciences. She also worked at the State Service for Cultural Heritage.

Jansma became famous in the Netherlands in the 1980s thanks to her poetry. In 1999, she received the VSB Poetry Award for her collection Hier is de tijd.

At first glance, her research work does not have much to do with literature. But Jansma considered them to be related. Wood patterns have a certain rhythm, just like the words in a poem, the national newspaper De Volkskrant wrote about Jansma's passing.

Literature and science also came together when she and her partner, the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Wiljan van den Akker, wrote a novel titled The Messiah together, under the pseudonym Julian Winter. The novel's protagonist investigates the provenance of a Stradivarius, therefore dealing with art, science and theories about economic efficiency.

In November 2024, she was knighted with the Order of the Dutch Lion by the Utrecht mayor Sharon Dijksma. She was recognised for her contribution as the founder of dendrochronology in the Netherlands and her research on the Roman Limes, the defence zone of the Roman Empire in Utrecht. Her research contributed to the recognition of part of the Limes as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2021. That same month, she published her last book of poetry, titled We must keep thinking: ‘Maybe’.