European History, Society and Culture

Patrick Pasture is Full Professor of European and Global History and Co-Director of the master program in European Studies: Transnational and Global Perspectives at KU Leuven. He has been a Visiting Fellow/ Scholar at the IISG (Amsterdam), the Centre d’histoire sociale du XXe siècle (Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), the University of Pennsylvania, Visiting Professor at Kobe University (Japan), the European Program of Drew University (Brussels Campus) and Peter Paul Rubens Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research mainly deals with the long-term history of Christendom and European history in a global and postcolonial perspective. He was the Project Leader of the H2020 Project RETOPEA (Religious Toleration and Peace) and principal investigator of the Jean Monnet Network European Transoceanic Encounters and Exchanges (ETEE). Recent publications include Imagining European Unity since 1000 AD (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and, with Riho Altnurme and Elena Arigita (eds), Religious Diversity in Europe: Mediating the Past to the Young (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently working on a new book History of Christendom: Church, State and Religious Freedom in the West (under contract with Bloomsbury).

Fred Truyen is professor of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts of KU Leuven University, where he teaches Information Science, Online Publishing and Digital Cultural Heritage and is currently the program director of the MSc in Digital Humanities. He is the coordinator of Fifties in Europe – Kaleidoscope, technical editor of the peer reviewed journal Image & Narrative, president of Photoconsortium, and is active on ICT at several levels of the university.

Fred Truyen is also a member of the Open Education Consortium and has been involved in many projects on Open Educational Resources, such as Net-CU, OCW EU and LACE, and on projects in digitization of Cultural Heritage, such as RICH, Europeana Photography, Europeana Space and CIVIC Epistemologies.

Lien Verpoest is Associate Professor at the research group Modernity and Society 1800-2000 at the History Department of the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts. She is a member of the Steering Committee of Metaforum, the interdisciplinary think tank of KU Leuven, senior member of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, and board member of the Leuven Institute of Advanced Studies (LIAS) and the Dutch-Belgian Working Group on Eighteenth Century Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of history, area studies and comparative politics. Within this context she works from a contemporary as well as an historical perspective. This translates itself in a research focus on diplomatic history and East-West relations, and the development of relations between various regional and subregional networks and organisations on the Eurasian continent. These research subjects are studied from the perspective of new diplomatic history, strategic narratives, and historic institutionalism. Lien Verpoest mainly publishes in the field of diplomatic history, with a focus on East-West relations and "unacknowledged diplomats". She is currently working on a biography of Marie-Caroline Murray, La Muse Belgique, who took on such an unacknowledged role in Brussels (1770-1798) and Vienna (1798-1830).

Since 2018 Lien Verpoest is a co-promotor of the C1-project CONNECTIVITY (2018-2024), which assesses the contestation of international norms and their impact on international relations. Sinds 2021, she is PI of a CELSA project on heritage diplomacy, titled Contested Heritage: the securitization of heritage in Eastern Europe and its challenges for EU and UN actorness, with the University of Tartu and the University of Prague as co-promotors.

Umar Ryad is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and head of the Research Unit of East Asian and Arabic Studies at the University of Leuven. Currently he is holder of Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2021-2024) at the Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien (CNMS), Philipps-Universität Marburg (2021-2024); and member of the Young Academy of Belgium (2018-2023).

Prior he has worked as assistant professor at the University of Leiden (2008-2014) and as associate professor at Utrecht University (2014-2017). He earned a BA in Islamic Studies in English from Al-Azhar University in Cairo (1998), followed by an MA degree in Islamic Studies (2001, Cum Laude) and a PhD degree (2008), both from Leiden University. His doctoral dissertation analyses the writings of the well-known Muslim reformist Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) on Christianity and Christian missions in the colonial age, which was publishes as the monograph, Islamic reformism and Christianity : a critical reading of the works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and his associates (1898-1935) (Brill, 2009). In this work, Ryad makes use of the private family archive of Rashid Rida, which has set the tone of Ryad’s later research and collecting of Arab and Muslim archives in the Arab world and Europe. His current research also includes the dynamics of the networks of pan-Islamist movements, Arab reception of Orientalism, Muslim polemics on Christianity, the European trans-imperial connections with the Hajj, transnational Islam in the modern world and the application of Digital Humanities to Arabic and Islamic Studies.

He led a European Research Council (ERC) project which focused on the “History of Muslims in Interwar Europe and European transcultural history” (2014-2019). The project studied the intellectual and religio-political roles played by Muslim “intellectual agents” during the interwar years and up until the end of World War II (1918-1946). He has been also a co-applicant of two ongoing international research projects: 1) Marie Curie ITN-project “Mediating Islam in the Digital Age” (MIDA) and 2) research consortium “The Computational Study of Culture: Cultural Analytics for Modern Arab and Muslim Studies”, which is funded by Qatar National Research Fund and is based at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Ryad also taught at the universities of Bern and Oslo; and was a research fellow at the University of Bonn, the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (Free University of Berlin), the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin and the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz. He is a board member of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS). He is also a member of the editorial board of Philological Encounters, Leiden: Brill; peer-reviewed journal Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship, the journal Trajecta. Religion, Culture and Society in the Low Countries (Amsterdam University Press), and member of the editorial team of Christian-Muslim Relations, A Bibliographical History 1500-1900, Leiden: Brill, hosted by the University of Birmingham. He was a panel member and chairman of various evaluation committees by Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organization (Nederlands - Vlaamse Accreditatieorganisatie, NVAO.

Kris Van Heuckelom has been affiliated with the research group Literary Theory and Cultural Studies since 2017 and currently teaches in various MA programs of the Faculty of Arts, both in Leuven and in Brussels (Cultural Studies, Master's in Western Literature, European Studies, Master's in Translation).

He spent his youth in the Campine region (east to Antwerp) and moved to Leuven in 1994 to study Slavic languages and cultures. After majoring in Polish literature at the University of Warsaw (1998-1999), he started working at the Faculty of Arts in the autumn of 2000, as a research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders. In the spring of 2003, he obtained – under the supervision of Prof. Zofia Klimaj-Goczołowa – his doctoral degree as the author of a PhD thesis on the ocularcentric discourse in the poetical works of the Polish Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz. One year later, the reworked (book) version of this dissertation was published in Polish by the Institute for Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Wizualność w poezji Czesława Miłosza). In 2005-2006, he moved to the US to become a H. Van Waeyenbergh of the Hoover Foundation Fellow (Belgian American Educational Foundation) at the University of Chicago and to pursue a postdoctoral research project devoted to idolatry and iconoclasm in the works of the Polish Modernist authors Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz. Right after this research stay in Chicago, in the autumn of 2006, Kris returned to Leuven and started teaching Polish language, linguistics and literature in the BA and MA programs in Slavic and Eastern European Studies. For ten years – until 2016, when both programs were closed down – he taught most of the Polish language, literature and culture classes in Leuven and was also the driving force behind the e-learning project Polish Your Polish, (Un)Polish Your Russian. A user-centered development of a multimedia lexicon for Polish/Russian/Dutch.

The literary and visual cultures of Polish Modernism and Late Modernism continue to play an important role in Kris's research and publications to date. Meanwhile, the aforementioned stay in Chicago (a city that, because of its very substantial Polish community, is sometimes jokingly referred to as "the second largest Polish city in the world", after Warsaw) also laid the foundation for another prominent line of research in his scholarly output, namely migration and mobility and the representation of these phenomena in contemporary literary and audiovisual culture. In 2019, this interest culminated in the elaborate monograph Polish Migrants in European Film 1918-2017, a book of which a – reworked and updated – Polish-language version is now being prepared. The thematic focus on migration intertwines in Kris's research with a profound interest in changing East-West relations and perceptions within Europe (before, during and after the Cold War). Witness to this, for example, the volumes Van Eeden tot heden. Literaire dwarsverbanden tussen Midden-Europa en de Lage Landen (2013) and European Cinema after the Wall. Screening East-West Mobility (2014), which he co-edited. A continuation of this line of research is the new project (in preparation) Imagining Socialist & Post-Socialist Mobilities: A Longitudinal Approach Towards Polish Road Narratives (1970-2020).

Comparative and transnational perspectives are, finally, also central to another important thread in Kris’s research agenda, namely Polish-Jewish relations before, during and after the Holocaust. In October 2020, he joined a couple of Polish, Israeli and American colleagues to establish a consortium (funded by the Rothschild Foundation) that will carry out comparative research – in three larger and three smaller language areas – into literary representations of the Holocaust after the year 2000 (abbreviated as CoHLIT-21). Many of the aforementioned themes and research interests funnily come together in what Kris – for many years now – considers to be his all-time favorite film, namely the American crime comedy The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998).

Kris is secretary of the Flemish Association for General and Comparative Literary Studies, co-editor of Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap and co-director of the Leuven research group MDRN. He is also active as a literary translator from Polish into Dutch and (co-)editoor of a number of anthologies, including work by, among others, Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, Adam Zagajewski and Ryszard Krynicki.

Sara Cosemans studied history at KU Leuven and obtained a dual degree in International and World history at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. In December 2021, she defended her PhD, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and conducted at KU Leuven, entitled 'The Internationalization of the Refugee Problem. Resettlement from the Global South during the 1970s'. For this project on the international resettlement of the Ugandan Asians, Chileans and Vietnamese, she conducted research in over 20 archives in 8 countries on 5 continents, including the UNHCR archives in Geneva, and the American, British, Australian, Ugandan, Vietnamese, and Chilean National archives. Together with an interdisciplinary team, she developed a groundbreaking method to deal with large collections of research data, consisting of digitized typewritten and digitally-born sources (such as electronic telegrams that started to emerge in the 1970s). More information on the method can be found in Grant, Philip, Ratan Sebastian, Marc Allassonnière-Tang and Sara Cosemans. 2021. Topic Modelling on Archive Documents from the 1970s: Global Policies on Refugees. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Advance articles: 1-22. doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab018

She currently works as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Group Cultural History since 1750 at KU Leuven and as an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences at UHasselt. She is currently setting up a project regarding debates on human mobility and freedom of movement in the context of the creation of international law between the 1940s and 1960s.

Idesbald Goddeeris is a Slavist and a historian, and a full professor at the KU Leuven Research Unit MoSa (Modernity and Society 1800-2000). He teaches courses on colonial history, history of Poland, and history of India. His research mainly focuses on the relationship of our society with other cultures and political regimes, and he has examined this by means of the history of migration, European identities, transnational social movements, East-West and North-South contacts, communist secret services during the Cold War, and postcolonial memories. His current project is on the history of missionaries after decolonization, particularly in India and the DRC. He was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics (2009), the University of Pennsylvania (2014), and the University of Oxford (2022) and recently also lectured at the universities of, inter alia, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Kinshasa, Krakow, and Irkutsk

Sascha Bru is professor in general literature. A Belgian scholar of Russian and Romanian descent, he has a strong interest in European culture, and in European avant-garde culture in particular.

Avant-garde culture in the broadest sense denotes all cultural practices that combine experimentation with a radical intent to re-imagine the world. Such practices can be found in many areas of culture (philosophy, science, politics, everyday life, etc.), yet Bru is particularly drawn to their manifestations within the arts—be it in literature or the visual arts, in architecture or the performance arts. Typical of avant-garde artistic practices is that they seem off or out of joint to most contemporaries and that their value only shows itself at a later date. Classic instances include the modernist movements of cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism and constructivism, to which Bru has devoted several studies. Bru also reflects on later twentieth-century avant-garde practices and on our current, twenty-first-century moment, in which almost everything seems off or out of joint. Whether there can still be talk of avant-garde art today is for that reason a matter of debate. It is important to wage this debate, however, because a culture without an avant-garde, that is, a culture that can no longer imagine itself differently and that can only reproduce itself, may well be in peril.

Bru’s work serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it aims to help disclose the history of European avant-garde practices in the arts within a global setting so that we come to better understand their past: their richness, complexity and conditions of possibility. On the other hand, Bru is interested in facets of avant-garde culture which we have not yet fully come to terms with and which could still inform cultural practice today or in the future.

Bru is a founder and former chair of the trilingual (French, German, English) European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), which biennially convenes at a European university to discuss research on modernist and avant-gardes practices in all the disciplines of the humanities. Bru acts as supervisor of various research projects in his field, as a director of the MDRN research lab, as head of the Theory and Cultural Studies Research Group, and as a member the university’s Culture, Art and Heritage Committee.

Tom Verschaffel (1964) studied History at KU Leuven and the European University Institute in Florence. He obtained his doctorate in 1996 with a dissertation on the historiography in the Austrian Netherlands. His research focuses on the historiography and the broad historic culture of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, public history and the visual representation of the past, cultural nationalism, and the history of cultural institutions in the fields of literature and the visual arts.

Some of his recent publications are De hoed en de hond. Geschiedschrijving in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden 1715-1794 (1998), Mise-en-Scène. Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (ed. with Robert Hoozee and Jo Tollebeek, 1999), , Sources of Regionalism in the Nineteenth Century. Architecture, Art and Literature (ed. with Linda van Santvoort and Jan de Maeyer, 2008), Historism and cultural identity in the Rhine-Meuse region (ed. with Wolfgang Cortjaens, 2008), Cultural mediation in Europa, 1800-1950 (ed. with Reyne Meylaerts and Lieven D’hulst, 2017), De weg naar het binnenland. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1700-1800: de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (2016), and Sculpting abroad. Nationality and mobility in the nineteenth century (ed. with Marjan Sterckx, 2020).

Martin Kohlrausch is professor of modern history with a focus on European political history at the history department of KU Leuven. Before joining KU Leuven he taught modern history at Technische Universität Berlin (2003-05), was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw (2005-09), lecturer at Bochum University (2009-11), Dilthey-Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung (2009-2017) and Fellow-in-Residence at the NIAS, Wassenaar Netherlands (2011). He also was Fellow of the C2DH, Luxembourg (2019) and Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz (2021). At KU Leuven he teaches courses on contemporary European history, imperial history and on the relation of politics and mass media. His research deals with the relation of politics and mass media with a focus on the monarchy, political scandals and changing notions of political leadership. A second strand of his research is concerned with the rise of (modernist) architects to new social and political meaning in the 20th century (see monograph ‘Brokers of Modernity. East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects’ (LUP, 2019). He understands architects as particularly intriguing examples of the modern expert emerging in the 19th century, a theme of his monograph ‘Building Europe on Expertise’, co-authored with Helmuth Trischler and part of the new European history ‘Making Europe’ (Palgrave 2014). Currently, he explores experts who turned into celebrities and projections screens of vast societal expectations in the 20th century, focusing mainly on architects Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.”

Beatrijs Van Acker is an Assistant Professor at KU Leuven, where she directs the research unit French, Italian and Spanish Literature. Her research interests include the history of literary translation, (female) authorship, and the relationship between literature and cultural identity formation. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with cultural transfer strategies in relation to a poetics of the novel in the Enlightenment. Currently, she leads the research project "Shaping Belgian Literature" (1750-1830) and the project "Found through Translation."

She was also a visiting research fellow at LMU (Munich) and Augsburg University in 2013 and at McGill University (Montreal) in 2017. She is co-editor (with Nathalie Kremer) of the series La République des Lettres at Peeters Publishers. Since 2019, she is also a member of the Belgian Young Academy (Jonge Academie).

Lieke van Deinsen holds a BA in Dutch Language and Culture (2009) and an MPhil in Literary, Cultural and Historical Studies (2011) from the Radboud University (The Netherlands). Currently, she works a tenure track assistant professor at KULeuven on the BOFZAP-project “Facing Diversity. Author Portraits and the Construction of Female Intellectual Authority in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800". Lieke is also a guest researcher of the KNAW NL-Lab team, an interdisciplinary research group focused on Netherlandish identity and culture.

In her interdisciplinary research Lieke combines a strong background in textual and literary analysis with a specialization in material and visual cultures, while utilizing new, digital methods. This becomes clear in her two books, her dissertation on processes of historical literary canon formation published as Literaire erflaters. Canonvorming in tijden van culturele crisis (Verloren 2017). As Johan Huizinga Fellow, Lieke wrote the first volume for the Rijksmuseum Studies in History series: The Panpoëticon Batavûm. The Portrait of the Author as a Celebrity (Rijksmuseum 2016).

Lieke is member of the board of the Dutch-Belgian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Werkgroep 18e Eeuw), the Young Academy Flanders, and co-coordinator of the Research Network “Women Writers in History”. She is also part of the Commissie Taal- en Letterkunde van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde and sits on the editorial board of multiple scientific journals, including Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde (TNTL) and Early Modern Low Countries (EMLC). She is also actively involved in various initiatives that make historical research accessible to the wider public, for instance by helping to revise and renew www.literatuurgeschiedenis.org, an educative website for schools. Furthermore, she is editor-in-chief of www.schrijverskabinet.nl, a website that digitally reconstructs the contents of the eighteenth-century Panpoëticon Batavûm, one of the first canonization initiatives of Dutch literature. In addition, Lieke has been guest-curator of exhibitions in the Allard Pierson Museum (Amsterdam) and Teylers Museum (Haarlem).