Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The royal museums of art and history: the history of its buildings ans its collections based on the museum's archives (RMACH)." "Inge Bertels" "Antwerp Cultural Heritage Sciences (ARCHES), Royal Museums of Art and History (KMKG-MRAH), Henry van de Velde" "Leaving aside a handful of recent scientific articles, the only general publication on the history of the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH), its buildings and the development of its collections is a Liber Memorialis, published in 1985 on the occasion of the museum's 150th anniversary. While the latter publication was aimed at a general public, no other encompassing scientific and critical study on the history of the RMAH that attempts at tracing this history against the background of broader (inter)-national socio-political and cultural developments, has so far been published, despite the fact that vast amounts of unstudied documentation are looming in the museum's institutional archives. Henceforth, the RMARCH project focusses on the history of the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH), based on its institutional archives. In collaboration with the archivist of the RMAH, the FED-tWIN researcher will work on eliminating the enormous backlog in archival description, (online) access and digitalisation of the RMAH institutional archives with the specific aim to make these archives available to the general public but also for further scientific research. Following the reorganisation of these archives, several research questions will be addressed that ultimately will result in a new critical and scientific study on the history of the RMAH. Special attention will be devoted to the various historical buildings of the different museums that form the RMAH but also to the different actors that were responsible for the development of its collections.RMARCH proposes a multi-disciplinary and cross-institutional approach that will build on the expertise of past and current research projects in both the RMAH and the University of Antwerp (UAntwerpen). The research opportunities that will emerge from opening up this important institutional archive will not only allow the FED-tWIN researcher with his/her focus and profile in archival studies and architectural history to rewrite the history of the RMAH but also to play a crucial role in connecting, moderating and advancing them into the broader field of heritage studies. These are ranging from archival and (art and architectural) historical research to conservation and restoration but also in new research fields such as digital humanities and the development of digital documentation, data visualisation and imaging technologies. In this respect, the synergy between the disciplines Heritage Studies and Conservation-Restoration of the Faculty of Design Sciences of the UAntwerpen also offers a unique opportunity to deeply embed this project into academic education and training and in cooperation with the two research groups Henry van der Velde and Heritage & Sustainability." "Celebrating gender and neglecting history: The history of gender representation in Moroccan primary school textbooks for colonial period onwards (1912-2022)" "Pieter Verstraete" "History of Education, Education, Culture and Society" "This research focuses on the history of gender representation in Moroccan textbooks and manuals for primary school grades within a broad chronological period (from the colonial era 1912 to date).The present research main objective is to investigate how gender was represented in primary school textbooks at three points in time: the French and Spanish colonial period, the immediate postcolonial era, and the present day, in terms of the visual discourse including: visibility, traits, characteristics, activities, and professions. This study also aims to analyze and compare the way gender was represented in these school textbooks at different historical periods to provide a framework for understanding how primary school textbooks of colonial, post-colonial, and present-day have defined the status of women within Moroccan society. A further objective of this study is to examine the association between the discriminatory attitudes of the Moroccan current generation toward women, and the historical representation of women in school primers. A further objective is to document how Moroccan teachers perceive and cope with gender representation in primary school textbooks while they are teaching." "Periodization in Literary History: A Computational Model of the History of Dutch Literature." "Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC), Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS), Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)" "In literary history, scholars commonly divide the temporal series of events which they are discussing into periods (e.g. Romanticism). This process is called periodization and it is considered an important task of historical literary scholarship. In spite of its present-day relevance, periodization remains a surprisingly controversial process: some of the most influential models in literary history are considered a 19th-century inheritance, of which the present-day validity is often questioned nowadays. The objective of this project is to build a computational model of the history of Dutch-language literature in the Low Countries (13th-20th century). This diachronic model will use techniques from computational text analysis (""Distant Reading"") to track changes in the stylistic and thematic characteristics of texts. Importantly, this will be a bottom-up model: it will be created in a data-driven manner, instead of setting out from existing (potentially preconceived) hypotheses. This model will be carefully interpreted and compared to the state of the art in traditional literary scholarship. This will allow us to verify and better understand the validity of established periodization models of Dutch literary history. This project will greatly contribute to the ongoing international debate about the integration of traditional, ""close reading"" methods in literary studies and new, computational methods for ""distant reading""." "The Normativity of the History: Theological Truth and Tradition in the Tension between Church History tematic Theology." "Lieven Boeve" "Research Unit of Systematic Theology and the Study of Religions, Research Unit of History of Church and Theology" "The project is dealing with the normativity of history for theology. Three research groups one embedded in the research department of History of Church and Theology, the two others from Systematic Theology use this thematic framework to focus and structure their research. In order to do so, three joint research avenues specifying the thematic framework have been conceived in which two of the three groups are engaged at any one time. A first research avenue focuses on the way in which the appeal to tradition in the development of tradition happens. The second avenue is engaged in combined theological-epistemological research into the status of tradition-bound truth within a general context of plurality. The third avenue is focused on the evolution and implications of the tradition regarding the churchs attitude towards non-Christians and their religious traditions. The research activities of the avenues are integrated in one research platform. It is from this platform that the different avenues are coordinated, and the general research questions issuing from the thematic framework are dealt with." "This story may provide proof. History and authority in Syriac excerpt collections and beyond" "Peter Van Nuffelen" "Department of History" "Combining intellectual history with material philology, this project studies the authority attributed to histories in Syriac excerpt collections (6-10th c). It uses unstudied material to analyse the intertwining of identity formation and historical narratives, to provide the first cross-cultural study of late antique excerpt collections, and to study the changing status of historical knowledge compared to other types of knowledge." "‘This story may provide proof’. History and authority in Syriac excerpt collections and beyond." "Peter Van Nuffelen" "Department of History" "Combining intellectual history with material philology, this project studies the authority attributed to histories in Syriac excerpt collections (6-10th c). It uses unstudied material to analyse the intertwining of identity formation and historical narratives, to provide the first cross-cultural study of late antique excerpt collections, and to study the changing status of historical knowledge compared to other types of knowledge." "Construction History, Above and Beyond. What History Can Do for Construction History" "Department of Architecture and urban planning, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Vrije Universiteit Brussel" "Since 1985, Construction History is internationally recognized as a distinct field within history, situated on the interface between the history of engineering and the history of architecture. Antoine Picon, historian of architecture and technology, argued in 2006 that construction history “offers a unique opportunity to rethink the relations between technology and culture."" This proposal starts from the observation that this opportunity has not yet been grasped in its full potential. Thanks to the state-of-the-art of Construction History research in Belgium, and the interest it currently arouses among other academic fields, we can build a strong case to unveil the untapped potential of Construction History as an ‘inter’disciplinary link between various fields in history. In this project, we propose to set up a dialogue (in terms of sources, methodologies, concepts and cognitive interests) between Construction History and three other fields of history, namely Colonial History, Legal History and Planning History. As such, we aim to strengthen the historical dimension of Construction History, while simultaneously demonstrating its relevance and potential to other fields and disciplines. The project will concentrate on 19th and 20th -century building knowledge and building practice in Belgium and its former colony, with particular attention for tacit knowledge, in order to voice crucial yet underrated actors, sources and types of knowledge." "Commissioned history and the confluence of history and jurisdiction. A comparative and meta-historical analysis of four government-appointed historical commissions in Europe after 1989" "Department of History" "Since the end of the Cold War many countries have turned to historical commissions as a way to deal with the past. This project comparatively analyses four post-1989 European government-appointed historical commissions (the German U+2018Enquete-kommisionU+2019, the Swiss U+2018Bergier-commissionU+2019, the Dutch Srebrenica-inquiry, and the Belgian Lumumba-commission) which are from an empirical and a meta-historical perspective. I focus on three sets of research questions: concerning the occasion, timing, purpose, and effects of historical commissions; concerning the relation between these commissions and the field of jurisdiction; and concerning their relation with U+2018traditionalU+2019 historiography." "Time-Travelling Boxes? French History Comics as a New Way of Considering History." "Maaheen Ahmed" "Department of Literary Studies, Department of History" "Lately, the assumption that comics are only made for entertainment and lack historical objectivity has tended to be obscured by a new function: historical fiction and nonfiction comics have established themselves as a laboratory for reflection on practices and meanings of historical writing, and have become both a phenomenon and a symbol. A phenomenon, for in France, since the 1990s, historical comics have been reaching a growing readership from various socio-cultural milieus; and a symbol of historiographic tensions and doubts, as many academics have been reading, commenting, and even creating history comics, in line with a reinvention of the historical discipline, hence opening up to new historiographic practices and to the popular treatment of history. This project analyzes these recent evolutions of representations and uses of history in French-language comics, by combining iconographic and literary analysis, the study of the publishing and reception of comics and interviews with authors, historians and publishers. I argue that history comics respond to a contemporary need to experience history but also to understand and reinvent its making and its functions. Indeed, one of the main effects of history comics today is to underline the current doubts of many historians concerning the capacity of scholarship to reconstruct history convincingly." "Modern time-consciousness: philosophy and politics of history - Leo Strauss on history and truth in the relation of theory and praxis." "Bart Raymaekers" "Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE)" "This project aims to analyze the political philosophy of the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) in the context of modern debates concerning history, time-consciousness, and the relation between theory and praxis. The project will include both a systematic and a historical dimension in the fields of political philosophy and philosophy of history.The first part of the project will clarify a set of problems centering on the relation of philosophy and politics in the post-Hegelian situation of a pervasive historial consciousness. The second part will investigate the thought of Leo Strauss as an attempt to give answers to these problems.The issues at stake include some of the most pressing problems for philosophical reflection on politics, such as historical relativism and the status of truth in the relationship between philosophy and politics. The work of Strauss faces these problems in highly relevant and still unappreciated ways. Simultaneously, these issues and Strauss's approach to them provide the key to a fuller understanding of Strauss's not easily accessible work. By offering a perspective that is at thispoint not available, this project will productively contribute to current scholarship on Strauss, while always bearing in mind the systematic import of his work."