Projects

This dissertation takes a fresh approach to the study of the exchange in scientific knowledge between Europe and continental East Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a particular interest in cartographic practice. The mapping of territories controlled by the Great Qing, initiated at the behest of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) and executed by teams of surveyors consisting of Qing officials and ...

The genre of the spiritual madrigal reached a height of popularity in the final decades of the 16th century. With its combination of philosophical and spiritual poetry, and the music-expressive power of the secular madrigal, it flourished in Counter-Reformist contexts as a medium for introducing sacred elements into the daily life. The Fleming Philippe de Monte (1521-1603) was not only one of the most significant and ...

The Counter Reformation caused the most dramatic musical shift the Catholic Church had seen in centuries. One of the key actors in this change were the Jesuits. Their expansion resulted in the dissemination of new music across the globe, reaching China, the Philippines and Mexico. But despite substantive research on Jesuit music elsewhere, we know little about their musical legacy in the Low Countries. Understanding this facet of Jesuit music ...

My research proposal is to study the biblical work of three Spanish Jesuit exegetes who were crucial to the formation of biblical studies during the Golden Age of Catholic Biblical Scholarship (1550-1650): Juan Maldonado, Alphonso Salmeron, and Francisco Ribera. My project will be able to fill a void in modern scholarship, which I was already able to make a start with through my dissertation on 'Jesuit Biblical Scholarship after Trent: ...

Missionaries stand quite awkwardly in the postcolonial era. Critics consider them as agents of a continuing ‘civilizing mission’ (Edward Said): the duty to bring (Western) ‘civilization’ to other parts in the world. Advocates emphasize missionaries’ continuing role in the development of new identities and the emancipation of marginalized regions and groups. This research project aims to participate in this debate by analyzing Christian ...

Cervical cancer can be eliminated as a public health problem by identifying precancerous lesions early. However, screening programmes are only effective if abnormal screening results received timely follow-up. In Flanders, 20% of abnormal screening are not followed-up timely. Evidence demonstrates that inadequate diagnostic follow-up of is associated with lower socio-economic position. It is unknown if these social inequalities are also ...

While there is high public support for electoral democracy worldwide, electoral turnout has been decreasing strongly in the past decades. This apparent contradiction leads to inequality between who turns out and who does not, and it is also likely to lower people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of elections. It is therefore unsurprising that political researchers and practitioners have looked for ways to increase turnout, but so far we know ...

In 2014, the Islamic State group established a Caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Many observers hailed this attempt at state-building as a new era of Jihad, focussed on local bureaucratic control, and thus radically different from the global terrorism of Al-Qaida. However, the vision to establish an Islamic state is in fact deeply engrained in Salafi-Jihadist ideology, and there have been multiple, though under-researched, attempts to establish ...