Who is who?
Marnix Beyen
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 19th and 20th 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.
Bruno Blondé
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).
Greet De Block
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 19th and 20th -century infrastructure-urbanization mechanisms to provide insight in current urban condition and related urban theories and practices.
Bert De Munck
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.
Henk de Smaele
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 19th and 20th 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.
Malika Dekkiche
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 13th till the 16th 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.
Pierre Delsaerdt
Professor Pierre Delsaerdt is a member of the CUH. His research focuses mainly on the history of the book as information medium 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 printing press as a political instrument in the late 18th century, and on the confiscations of valuable books and manuscripts in the Southern Low Countries in 1794-95 by the French occupying forces.
At the Department of History he teaches courses such as Early Modern Cultural History, 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.
Theodor Dunkelgrün
Theodor Dunkelgrün joined the University of Antwerp as Assistant Professor of Jewish History with the Institute of Jewish Studies and the Department of History in 2023. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with special interest in the History of the Book, the History of the Jews, the History of the Humanities, and in interactions between Jewish, Christian and Islamic scholars. At the heart of his work is the Hebrew Bible, as a key to multiple traditions, as the object of philological work, and as a material text.
At the Department of History he teaches "Jewish Culture in Different Contexts" (BA), "Early Modern Jewish History" (MA), "Early Modern Historical Research" (BA, with Reinoud Vermoesen and Malika Dekkiche), and "The Culture of Renaissance Humanism" (MA, 2026).
Oscar Gelderblom
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 19th and 20th century (SoHiFi). At the Department of History he teaches a BA3 seminar with Ruben Peeters (postdoc).
Hilde Greefs
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 19th 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.
Julia Heinemann
Julia Heinemann is Assistant Research Professor for political history of the early modern period and a member of PoHis. In her research, she combines perspectives and methods of political history, social history and historical anthropology. She specializes in the history of the body, gender, dis/ability, kinship, and the military in early modern Europe. Her publications cover a broad range of topics, from kinship relations in the sixteenth-century French royal family to military welfare in the eighteenth-century Habsburg monarchy. Currently, she is working on a book on disabled soldiers and leads a project on ‘The Making of In/valids in the Habsburg monarchy’ (funded by the Austrian Science Fund).
At the Department of History, she teaches courses about power and hierarchies in the early modern period, the history of the body, and topics and debates of political history.
Iason Jongepier
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.
Margot Luyckfasseel
Margot Luyckfasseel is Junior Research Professor in Modern African History and member of the CUH. She specialises in Congolese history from below (late 19th century to the present), with a thematic focus on urban dynamics, language ideologies, and (post)colonial power relations. Additionally, she is developing an interest in socio-economic themes such as slavery and trade. She has conducted fieldwork in the cities of Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Gemena, and she prefers to combine oral history and archival sources.
Luyckfasseel teaches the courses History of colonisation and decolonisation: Central Africa and Belgium (together with Marnix Beyen) and African histories of Trade.
Kim Overlaet
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.
Jeroen Puttevils
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.
Roschanack Shaery-Yazdi
Professor Roschanack Shaery-Yazdi is an Associate Professor of the Modern Islamic World in the history department at the University of Antwerp. In 1998, she received my MA in Cultural Anthropology and Education from the University of Heidelberg and completed her PhD with honors in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Chicago in 2005. Before joining the history department at the University of Antwerp in 2016, she held a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of the contemporary Middle East, she focuses on the Arab East (Lebanon, Syria, and increasingly Palestine) and Iran. Her approach to the region's political history is ethnographic and informed by discussions in postcolonial studies.
In the past two decades, she has written two books and various journal articles on expressions of political violence in Lebanon in light of the country’s entanglement with Iran and Syria: Shi’ite Lebanon. Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Caring Violence. Syrian Authoritarianism and Enforced Disappearances in Lebanon (1976-2005) (Under review).
Her newest project deals with East Asian, mainly Japanese and South Korean, official cultural politics in the Middle East.
Tim Soens
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.
Peter Stabel
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.
Ilja Van Damme
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 (18th-20th centuries). His research on processes of modernization focusses in particular on the history of consumption, entertainment, tourism 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. He is the chief editor of the Dutch periodical Stadsgeschiedenis and teaches main courses such as Urban History & Theory.
Maarten Van Ginderachter
Professor Maarten Van Ginderachter is a member of PoHis. He specializes in world history and in the social history of nations and nationalism in modern Europe. He is the author of Arm Vlaanderen: een wereldgeschiedenis – Honger, ziekte en globalisering in het midden van de 19de eeuw (Horizon, 2025), The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History of Modern Belgium (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Het rode vaderland: de vergeten geschiedenis van de communautaire spanningen in het Belgische socialisme voor WO I (Lannoo, 2005). He was the 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 History of Belgium.
Reinoud Vermoesen
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, Heuristics and History and Numbers (statistics).