Projects

Which official historical and identity discourses do the Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh governments wield between 1982 and 2019? How does this discourse differ through time (synchronically) and through space (diachronically)? Which episodes are deemed most important?
During the last decades, instrumentalization of the past and identity formation have become an integral aspect of much domestic and international policy-making in Eastern ...

This research project aims at investigating the relation between media and nation-building in Flanders. The project consists of two parts. First, the project focuses on film and nation-building in Flanders from 1945 until today. Through quantitative and qualitative textual film analyses, the project critically examines the cinematic representation of Flanders and Flemish identities. Second, the project places these findings in their broader ...

This sabbatical leave is intended to finish three ongoing publication projects: 1) "De taal van de geschiedenis" [The language of history], a handbook for the course Geschiedenis & Taal, but at the same time a practical treatise for everyone wanting to apply discourse analysis to written historical sources and anyone writing about history. 2) "The Parisians and their Deputies. A Local History of National Politics, 1880-1930", an academic ...

This project focuses on influential female activists in Egypt, Tunisia and the Middle East. It examines the complexities of their identities, their modes of resistance and the politicized public spaces they 7 move in. It is a visual investigation into the representation of these Muslim women and their role, and more specifically the role of their bodies within the context of reform, resistance and revolution. Can images invite viewers to ...

This project offers an in-depth study of the polymorphic reception of the Middle Dutch or 'Flemish' mysticalauthor Hadewijch (ca. 1240) within the intellectual field and the wider socio-cultural field in Interwar Flanders(including Brussels), a society characterized by acute 'pillarization'. The enthusiast appropriation of the hithertohardly known oeuvre of Hadewijch by a remarkably broad range of intellectuals belonging to very different ...

Today, landscape design plays an increasingly important role in ecological development and infrastructure planning, leading to a disciplinary realignment between landscape designers, ecologists and engineers. Current research and design proposals on 'metropolitan landscapes' in Belgium tie in with international trends in design, based on two main concepts: (1) a balance between 'the urban' and 'the natural' and (2) the potential of landscape ...

In the course of the 20th century, violent conflicts, ethnic struggle and humanitarian crises caused an extensive number of children being transferred from one country to another. Philanthropic and nationalist objectives, the children's 'best interests', but also a growing 'demand' from childless couples lay at the basis of these displacements. This project aims to investigate how post-war cases of transnational child displacements were ...

Rather than analyzing medical and theological expert discourses and single cases, this project focuses on the popular response to stigmatics in Europe in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century and studies their 'cluster moments', reception radius and impact. This project draws attention to the politico-religious context in which stigmatics were reported and the political meaning some of them were given. We believe that by analyzing the ...

The project sets the stage for a future PhD research project on the genesis of the Manifesto of Italian Fascist Intellectuals to the Intellectuals of all Nations (1925-26) and the network behind it. Funding is required for the first step of a PhD research project. This first step aims at constituting the 'genetic dossier' of the Manifesto, answering the following research questions: which documents can be used to study the genesis of the ...

Internationally, landscape and nature/ecology are foregrounded as a new ground to recalibrate the discipline of spatial planning. However, in Flanders there is a problematic tension between landscape and nature policy, translated in planning strategies based on either static zoning or on a dynamic systemic development; a divide standing in the way of this new integrated conception of spatial planning. As first step in bridging the divide, the ...