About me

I am a historian and sociologist working as a PhD researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. I spend most of my time thinking and writing about the past and its place in contemporary societies. I am intrigued by the many ways in which history enters people’s daily lives — through academic knowledge, in cities’ architectural heritage, in memory, in design, and in art. My work blends academic research with the development of public history projects, and I have experience in art criticism.

Since 2016, I have been doing research in the history of history-writing and the history and sociology of knowledge at Ghent University (MA in History 2017, PhD in History planned for 2024) and at The University of Chicago (MA in the Social Sciences 2018). My academic work questions the past and present conditions in which knowledge is produced. In 2024, I will defend a dissertation titled The Price of History about the history of research funding and its effects on the historical discipline since 1970. Additionally, I am working on a research project on the history of peer review in the humanities (with Sjang ten Hagen), which touches on issues of academic inequality, (hyper)competition, and quantitative performance assessment. We just launched an open call for papers for a Special Issue, you can find it here. Together with Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, and Walderez Ramalho, I also research uses of the past by populist political parties and movements.

I strongly believe in the significance of making academic research accessible to the broader public and in the power of narratives to touch people and transform our beliefs. In my roles as an academic, a history-enthusiast and as a feminist art-lover, I frequently share my thoughts through various public platforms. I am currently working on a podcast project on unknown urban spaces and their histories in Antwerp (Belgium) with Troebel vzw. In this project, Maïté De Haan and myself explore the past, present, and future of places we have always passed by in our hometown, but which we have never before entered. Up to 2016, I was a freelance art critic, writing mostly about contemporary art, but also at times about theatre and performance arts. I also work(ed) as a volunteer, freelancer, and intern in a variety of cultural institutions and festivals in Flanders.