UP Postdoc Community kicks off 2026 with a Writing Retreat

For the second year in a row, we’ve taken advantage of January to come together as postdocs, get away from the city, and dedicate some time to being together and writing. It’s a great way to “break the ice” and reconnect after the Christmas break, and this year, quite literally, since we arrived to find everything covered in snow! Slowly, the snow has been melting, giving us some special views from our windows.

This year’s retreat took place at ISVW Landgoed, right next to the forest in Amersfoort, where we spent almost three days together. The venue has been home to the International School of Philosophy, founded over a hundred years ago, and you can really feel that history in the small details. Our rooms were named after philosophers, and each had a bookshelf with some of their works. We stayed in rooms named after Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Isaiah Berlin, and Buddha. Our working room was called Stoa, referring to the Greek porticos like the famous ones in the Athenian Agora where Stoic philosophy originated.

Each of us came to the retreat with a different goal, depending on where we are in our postdoc journey. Rubén Vezzoni, who has just started his position, worked on his postdoc research plan. Annemiek Prins focused on rewriting a project deliverable for publication. Danielle McCarthy spent her time analyzing and drafting findings from her interviews. Pinar Sefkatli focused on getting into her rhythm after a deadline and started to work on the final stage of her analysis. Wenwen tackled some challenging paper revisions, and Irene Gómez-Varo analyzed interviews and organized ideas for her new postdoc project.

Some of us used the Pomodoro method to work in a focused way, and whenever we needed to stretch our legs, it was wonderful to be able to take a walk in the forest right outside our door — can we bring that to the office, please?

Beyond working, the writing retreat was a great opportunity to connect, get to know each other even better, talk about our academic lives and about more personal and trivial things; laugh, and play games. Not to mention, we really enjoyed the delicious food and the comfort of our cozy rooms. We missed the UP postdoc colleagues who could not join this time, so we are already thinking of a future edition.

See you next week, but this time at Roeterseiland! For now, we’ll put you n the picture with some images from the writing retreat: