Professor Marnix Beyen is a member of PoHis, which he founded in 2004. His current work is situated at the crossroads between Political and Cultural History. Key to Beyen’s research is the concept of representation, with which he refers to processes of parliamentary representation on the one hand, and the (cultural) envisioning of nations and other collectivities such as ‘the people.’ He focusses on the parliamentary cultures of Belgium, The Netherlands and France in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and pays increasing attention to the colonial history of these countries. At the Department of History, Beyen teaches courses on Political History, such as War and Occupation in the Middle East (1914-1945). Beyen is vice-dean for Community Service of the Faculty of Arts since 2021.

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Professor Bruno Blondé is a member of the CUH, the Urban Studies Institute and AIPRIL. The theme central to his research is the relationship between economic growth and social inequality. Blondé is an expert in the history of material culture and consumption in the Low Countries (fifteenth-eighteenth centuries) and specialized in interconnecting debates on the ‘material renaissance’ with the late early modern consumer 'revolutions'. He teaches courses such as Socioeconomic History (Middle Ages-Modern Period) and Quantitative historical research. Blondé also actively engages in Research Policy as a member of the Board of Governors of the Foundation for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO-V).

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Greet De Block’s is Research Professor at the CUH and member of the Urban Studies Institute. Her research is positioned at the nexus of urban history and urban studies, with a focus on infrastructure. Current research sees infrastructure as driving force of socio-spatial development, with projects structured along two main research lines: (1) technological design: planning intentions, material politics, and agendas of de/reterritorialization inscribed into the design of infrastructure and associated mobility policies; (2) effects of technology: mobility flows, socio-economic processes, and landscape transformation. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, linking urban history with Science and Technology Society studies, urban design, political geography, and landscape studies. Moreover, De Block mobilizes her research on 19^th and 20^th -century infrastructure-urbanization mechanisms to provide insight in current urban condition and related urban theories and practices.

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Professor Bert De Munck is a member of the CUH and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Urban Studies Institute and the International Scientific Research Community (WOG) ‘Urban Agency’. His research addresses a broad range of topics on the crossroads of the fields of the history of knowledge, material culture, and civil society in the (Early) Modern Period. De Munck deals specifically with the valuation of knowledge and skills, the relation between knowledge and the urban context and the role of knowledge in governance and political thought in the (early) modern period. He also pays attention to epistemological developments in historical research in general. At the History Department he teaches courses such as Early Modern History, Theory of Historical Knowledge and History of Science and Society.  

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Professor Henk de Smaele is a member of PoHis. Themes central to his research are the history of gender and sexuality (masculinities, homosexuality, transnational feminism) in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and the history of intercultural contacts and encounters between the Ottoman Empire / Turkey and ‘Europe’. He teaches courses such as History of the Body, Gender and Sexuality. De Smaele is co-chair of the Archive and Research Centre for Women’s History in Brussels (AVG-Carhif), and one of the founding members of the Forum for Belgium Research on the History of Women, Gender and Sexuality. He has been the founding Director (2014-18) of the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA). As member of ARIA’s steering committee, de Smaele contributes to the facilitation, promotion and organisation of artistic research in the Antwerp University Association.

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Professor Malika Dekkiche is a member of PoHis. Her research focuses on the history of the contacts between Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran in the 13^th till the 16^th century. She studies how and why these (diplomatic, economic…) exchanges took place, and on which basis. Via innovative methodologies and new empirical data, Dekkiche questions the traditional historiographical interpretation of a divide between an Islamic and a Christian world in the premodern period. Since 2022, she is one of the supervisors of the FWO-EOS funded project ‘DiplomatiCon: A Connected History of Medieval Mediterranean Diplomacy: The Mamluk Sultanate, Italy, and the Crown of Aragon (14th-15th century).’ She teaches methodological courses and main courses such as History of the Islamic World.

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Professor Pierre Delsaerdt is a member of the CUH. His research focuses on the history of the book as a material object and on the history of the book trade, libraries and bibliophily, especially in the Southern Netherlands in the early modern period and in the 19th century. He is currently doing research on the confiscations of valuable books and manuscripts in the Southern Netherlands in 1794-95 by the French occupying forces. At the Department of History he teaches courses such as History of the printed book and History of the Low Countries. He also teaches courses in the master’s profile 'History and Cultural Heritage'. He is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.

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Professor Luc Duerloo is a member of PoHis. He studies the early modern dynastic politics and the political culture of Habsburg Europe. He has published widely on the reign of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, in particular on their dynastic and international politics, their public devotions, and their political representation. Concerning the latter, his current research projects consider their artistic patronage and the royal hunt as an assertion of power. He has also worked on the history of the nobility and of heraldry. At the Department of History Duerloo teaches courses such as Political History (Early Modern Period) and The History of Central Europe.

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Oscar Gelderblom is Research Professor at the CUH and AIPRIL. He is the PI of a running FWO-Odysseus funded project titled ‘The Social History of Finance’. Gelderblom has a special interest in the history of trade and finance. He has published widely on the organization of long-distance trade in early modern Europe, on financial markets, entrepreneurship, migration and political economy. Gelderblom currently works on the early history of the Dutch East India Company, the financial development of the Low Countries before the Industrial Revolution, and on historical household finance in the 19^th and 20^th century (SoHiFi). At the Department of History he teaches a BA3 seminar with Ruben Peeters (postdoc).

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Professor Hilde Greefs is a member of the CUH and the current head of the Department of History. She is a specialist in social and economic history of the long 19^th century and the Interwar period. Themes and topics central to her research are migration and mobility, social and economic networks, and changes in the urban environment, in port cities in particular. She is also interested in periods of crisis (economic, social or health) and studies which social groups were vulnerable and how societies dealt with these crises. She is a.o. one of the supervisors of ‘EPIBEL - Epidemics and Inequality in Belgium from the Plague to COVID-19’, which is funded by the BRAIN-be 2.0 program (2018-23). She teaches main courses about the Modern Period as well as specialized courses in migration and urban history.

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Professor Iason Jongepier is a member of CUH as tenure track lecturer (50%) within the FED-tWIN DIGHIMAPS project, (University of Antwerp & the State Archives of Belgium). DIGHIMAPS - Digital Maps and Archives - Activating Cartographic Collections in a Digital World seeks to explore the potential of digital cartographic collections as key to unlock a new digital universe in which space enables an entirely novel way to organize, search, analyse and visualize archival data and collections. At the same time, Iason Jongepier is closely involved as GIS and Spatial Humanities expert in research projects like the Antwerp Time Machine, CLARIAH-VL and DiplomatiCon (FWO EOS. He teaches methodological courses such as Digital History, with Jeroen Puttevils.

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Professor Guido Marnef is a member of the CUH. His research focuses on processes of religious change in the cities of the early modern Low Countries.  Furthermore, he focuses on agents of cultural life in early modern cities and on the history of the Dutch Revolt. He is currently involved as a curator in the exhibition project about the Jesuits as baroque influencers in early modern Antwerp. At the History Department, he mainly teaches about early modern cultural and religious history, such as Cultural History (Premodern Period).

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Dr. Kim Overlaet is the research coordinator of the Department of History. She is responsible for informing all members about the various funding opportunities for research projects and helps candidates with their project applications. Her tasks also include the coordination and support of the Department in general – in close collaboration with Hilde Greefs and Tim Soens. As go-to-person, she helps to ensure the general welfare of all members of the Department.

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Jeroen Puttevils is Research Professor and a member of the CUH. He studies urban societies in the late medieval and 16th-century Low Countries, with a focus on the interaction between culture and economy and future expectations. He aims to better understand the decisions (and their consequences) made by people participating in economic and cultural activities as diverse as long-distance trade, gambling, buying lottery tickets or insuring ships. He has a blog on lotteries in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. Since 2020, he leads the project Back to the Future: Future expectations and actions in late medieval and early modern Europe, c.1400-c.1830’, which is funded by an ERC Starting Grant. This project studies merchants’ future expectations and actions through in-depth analyses of their correspondences. Jeroen Puttevils is active on Twitter.

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Professor Roschanack Shaery-Yazdi is the Academic Director of PoHis. Her research interests include transnationalism, Islamism, political violence, and memory politics in the Arab East (in particular Lebanon and Syria) and Iran. Her first book Shiite Lebanon was published with Columbia University Press in 2008. Shaery’s new monograph Moving Histories. Syrian Regime and Abductions in Lebanon is forthcoming. She teaches courses on the Modern Middle East, specifically on the history of the Arab East in the interwar period, as well as on culture and heritage in the modern Middle East.

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Professor Tim Soens is an expert in Medieval and Environmental History and the current vice head of the Department of History. As a member of the CUH, he leads the research team ENVIRHUS – Environmental and Rural History of Urbanized Societies. His research focuses on crises and frictions in the relationship between societies and nature. The question central to his research projects is why some people are more vulnerable to disasters such as storm surges, floods, pandemics and food shortages. Soens considers social inequality and poverty as key factors to understand and assess people’s resilience and vulnerability. As a member ofAIPRIL he currently also coordinates EPIBEL - Epidemics and Inequality in Belgium from the Plague to COVID-19. It is funded by the BRAIN-be 2.0 program (2018-2023). He teaches Medieval History and Environmental History.

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Professor Peter Stabel is a mediaevalist and the current Academic Director of the CUH. He publishes on a wide range of subjects, dealing with the social history of medieval cities, industrial and commercial developments, guilds, gender and social identity. His expertise covers the cities of Western Europe as well as cities in the medieval Islamic World. His current research interests include a comparative investigation of industrial development in medieval Europe during the Industrial Revolution. Stabel is involved in the European-wide network of City Museums, organized by MuhBa, the historical museum of the City of Barcelona and is the current chair of the European Association for Urban History. He teaches methodological courses and main courses in the Urban History cluster, such as City and society in the Low Countries.

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Professor Ilja Van Damme is a member of the CUH and the Urban Studies Institute. He is a specialist in analyzing urban life and culture in the modern period (18^th-20^th centuries). His research on processes of modernization focusses in particular on the history of consumption, entertainment and shopping, as well as on changes in the public and private spheres. He studies the city mainly as a place of creative and socio-cultural interactions. Van Damme stimulates the use of new digital methods and techniques (GIS, digital text analysis, computer vision, big data research). He is keen to share his expertise on history and heritage with the broader society, often in direct dialogue with Belgian museums and the media, and is the chief editor of the Dutch periodical Stadsgeschiedenis. He teaches main courses such as Urban History & Theory.

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Professor Maarten Van Ginderachter is a member of PoHis. He specializes in the social history of nations and nationalism in modern Europe. He is the author of The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium (Stanford University Press, 2019); and co-editor of National indifference and the history of nationalism in modern Europe (Routledge, 2019), and Nationhood from below. Europe in the long nineteenth century (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012). A Fulbright scholar, he has held visiting positions at Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the Department of History he teaches the courses Introduction to world history, History of colonization and decolonization: Central Africa and Belgium, and Contemporary history.

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Dr. Reinoud Vermoesen is the education coordinator of the Department of History. As a member of the CUH, his research is situated at the intersection of urban and rural history, including topics such as early modern urban agriculture and urban-rural flows. He also has expertise on early modern colonial history. He teaches courses such as Historical Exercises and History and Numbers (statistics).

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