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.

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.

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 histories of Ghent and Liège University. For more information, click here.