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 foreseen for 2024), and The University of Chicago (MA 2018). In the past seven years, I have focused mostly on the history of historiography, which is also sometimes called the history of history-writing, but which I like to think about as meta-history. This particular subfield studies people’s relationships to the past and to historical objects. Those relationships are cognitive, as well as emotional and social, and they constantly shift. I am interested in these relationships people have to the past, both within the academy and outside the ivory tower.

In line with these interests, my work so far has always addressed how big twentieth-century trends have affected the production of historical knowledge, and the humanities more broadly. I have looked at the way in which digitization, the rise of populism, neoliberalization, and the “linguistic turn” affected humanities scholars, thereby touching on their roles as experts, as professionals, and as peers. At the moment, I am finishing a dissertation on the history of research funding of historical research by the European Union, which is focused on changing funding paradigms and their effects on the historical discipline. I am also working on a side-project on the history of peer review in the humanities with Sjang ten Hagen (Utrecht University). We just launched a call for papers for a Special Issue on this topic for Minerva, you can find it here. I have previously published work on the introduction of computers in medieval history, and on the use of history by populist parties and movements.

Academic publications

(forthcoming) 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, Special Issue: International Circulations and Inequalities in the Social Sciences, expected Spring 2024.

(forthcoming) 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, expected Spring 2024.

(forthcoming) 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, expected Spring 2024.

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. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-008.

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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-021-09408-5.

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. http://dx.doi.org/10.19272/201911501004.

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. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10417.

Research projects:

  • My doctoral dissertation, The Price of History: A History of European Funding for Historical Research (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.

  • 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 this 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.

  • 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. I have 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 have 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, where I am co-coördinator.

  • 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.