What I study

My academic background lies in the history and sociology of science and knowledge, which I studied at KU Leuven (BA 2016), Ghent University (MA 2017, PhD 2024), and The University of Chicago (MA 2018).

My work so far has always addressed how big twentieth-century trends have affected the use and production of humanities knowledge, and historical knowledge in specific. I am interested in how trends like digitization, European integration, neoliberalization, the birth of the "knowledge society", the rise of populism and the massification of universities affected humanities scholars and historians after 1945, thereby touching on their roles as experts, as professionals, and as peers.

In June 2024, I defended a dissertation on the history of European research funding for historical research. Since then, I started a new FWO Junior Postdoctoral research project on the history of peer evaluation in the humanities with Sjang ten Hagen (Utrecht University) and joined the team of Johan Östling at Lund University to study the Europeanization of universities between 1980 and 2010. Together with four other historians and sociologists, I formed the Constructive Advanced Thinking Group Freedom to Research which addresses the effects of various funding regimes on humanities scholars. I also continue to work with my colleagues Berber Bevernage, Walderez Ramalho and Eline Mestdagh on political uses of history and the relationship between history and democracy. Much of this work relates to the Centre for Meta- and Public History at Ghent University, where I am part of the co-ordinating team.

  • Peer review, which can be defined as the (institutionalized) evaluation of scholars and their research by others working in the same field, nowadays occupies a central place in academic lives. Through peer review, scholars establish worth hierarchies and decide what is publishable, fundable, and worth of recognition. In my postdoc project, I look at the historical and contemporary practices of peer review in the humanities, a set of disciplines which have their own ways of evaluating research(ers). I ask how peer review changed, and to what effects. Part of the project is a collaborative editorial undertaking with Sjang ten Hagen (Utrecht University), part of it I do on my own. Read more about it here.

  • My doctoral dissertation, The Price of History: Historical research and changing European funding regimes, 1970-today focuses on how changing research funding regimes affected the historical discipline after the 1970s. Where research funding was once a nice-to-have, after the 2000s, applying for competitive, external, project funding became increasingly important to European historians. My dissertation asks how this competitive regime affected historians, and looks at how over 800 million EUR was spent on historical research by the European Union and the European Science Foundation. I discuss how this money was allocated, where it went, and who benefited from European-level funding. Read more here.

  • Between February and July 2025, I am joining the project “The Europeanisation of the Universities: Transforming Knowledge Institutions from Within, c. 1985-2010” of Johan Östling at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Lund University. In this project, we study how Europeanisation changed universities in various European contexts, both in cultural, social and economic senses. I will be focusing on the history of Ghent University. For more information, click here.

  • History changes, all the time. It is revised by historians, but our perceptions of the past are also influenced by a host of other actors. In the past few years, I conducted several research projects about how history is used in public settings, both by populists across the globe (in collaboration with Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, and Walderez Ramalho), and within the context of the European Parliament debates about “European memory”. In addition, I co-organized doctoral schools, conferences, and lecture series about the use of history super-diverse societies, the restitution of colonial collections, and history and responsibility. See the website of TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt for a series of events we organized.

  • All scholars nowadays work with computers: to calculate results, to consult sources, to build databases, to e-mail colleagues, to write their research papers, etc. Entire fields such as “digital humanities” even reflect on the use of computers in humanities research. Little, however, is known about the ways in which computers first entered humanities disciplines. This project, which I pursued during my Masters’ studies in the Social Sciences at The University of Chicago, focused on the introduction of computers in (French) medieval history in the 1960s and up to the mid-1990s. It covers the first use of punch cards by medievalists, their debates about “compatibility”, and their first attempts at creating a community of “computer-users”. An article on the subject was published in 2019, you can find it here.

My projects

Academic publications

Journal article “Europe as Opportunity: How Europeanisation changed Ghent University in the 1980s and 1990s,” European Educational Research Review, (2026).

Introduction with Johan Östling, Maria Simonsen, Karl Haikola and Martin Hamre, “Introduction to Special Issue: Mapping the Europeanisation of the Universities in the 1980s and 1990s ”, European Educational Research Review, (2026).

Conclusion with Johan Östling, Maria Simonsen, Karl Haikola and Martin Hamre, “Conclusion to Special Issue: Mapping the Europeanisation of the Universities”, European Educational Research Review, (2026).

Journal article with Sjang ten Hagen, “The Past and Present of Peer Review in the Humanities: An Introduction”, Minerva—A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 63, no. 4 (2025): 637–657.

Special issue with Sjang ten Hagen (eds.), The Past and Present of Peer Review in the Humanities, Minerva—A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 63, no. 4 (2025): 637–801.

Journal article “History, agency, competitive funding,” Quaderni Storici, 177, no. 3 (2024): 789–810.

Dissertation The Price of History: Historical research and changing European funding regimes, 1970-today, Ghent University, Department of History, 2024.

Journal article Verbergt, Marie-Gabrielle, “Rigid criteria should not be established? A history of peer evaluation in European humanities funding”, Serendipities – Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences, 8, no. 1–2: Special Issue: International Circulations and Inequalities in the Social Sciences (2024): 58–76.

Book Bevernage, Berber, Mestdagh, Eline, Ramalho, Walderez and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt (eds.), Claiming the people’s past: Populist politics of history in the twenty-first century, Metamorphoses of the Political, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Introduction Bevernage, Berber, Mestdagh, Eline, Ramalho, Walderez and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, “Towards a theory of populist historical reason” in Claiming the people’s past: Populist politics of history in the twenty-first century, Metamorphoses of the Political, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 1–28.

Book chapter Verbergt, Marie-Gabrielle, “History for EU Policy: Policy-oriented history as a new type of history” in New Roles for Professional Historians, The Politics of Historical Thinking, eds. Berber Bevernage and Lutz Raphael, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, 185–212.

Journal article Verbergt, Marie-Gabrielle, “On the Emergence of Anti-Relativism in the EU’s Historical Culture (2000-2020)”, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 35 (2021): 517–544.

Journal article Verbergt, Marie-Gabrielle, “Borgesian Dreams and Epistemic Nightmares: The Effects of Early Computer-Use on French Medievalists (1970-1995)”, Storia della Storiografia – History of Historiography 75, nr. 1 (2019): 83–104.

Journal article Buylaert, Frederik and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, “Constructing and Deconstructing the ‘State’: the case of the Low Countries”, BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 132, nr. 4 (2017): 75–79.