Projects
Building on the edge. A socio-cultural approach of rural stone domestic buildings on the north-western edge of the Roman Empire Ghent University
Stone domestic architecture is first encountered in north-western Gaul in the Roman period. The shift from indigenous houses in perishable materials to residences in stone is a major turning point in the history of the region and reveals how native inhabitants were engaging with the Roman cultural sphere. This project investigates an understudied corpus of rural stone dwellings in north-western Gaul, not as so often from an economic point of ...
Empire of Print: Modernism and the British Post/Colonial Press, 1882-1967 Ghent University
“Empire of Print” studies the work of four late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century authors in the colonial and postcolonial press. Unlike the little magazine, the newspapers of the British Empire have not yet been fully examined in relation to moderni
Bathing on the edge of the Empire. A cross-cultural study of Roman baths in northern Gaul. Ghent University
The Romans were the first to introduce communal bathing habits in northern Gaul (modern Belgium, Luxemburg and the southern part of the Netherlands). These highly technological and richly decorated bathhouses were markers of Roman culture, linked to Roman ideas about health and the body. This project investigates the public and private Roman-style baths in northern Gaul to understand a) the peculiarities of Roman-style baths in this region ...
“Political Assassination in the Late Roman Empire” - Towards a new approach to studying state power and weakness in Ancient Europe and the Mediterranean Ghent University
Modern scholarship has examined political violence in the Late Roman Empire (late fourth to early sixth centuries CE) mainly as the result of mass migration processes, or as the self-evident outcome of imperial disintegration in the western Mediterranean and its hinterland. Instead, my project investigates this era’s increase in murder (in sharp contrast to the late third and fourth centuries) in both western and eastern spheres of the Late ...
U+201CDecline and fall?U+201D Social and cultural dynamics in the Low Countries in the Late Roman empire (AD 270-450). Ghent University
Since GibbonU+2019s Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776), the late Roman period is known as a period of decline. In recent decades, this view is debated. Our researchaims at studying this era from a modern vision upon material culture. The immiagrtions which where put negatively from a Roman point of view, will de considered from an angle of new social and culturele formations.
"Would it be paradoxical to say that Argentina is closer to Europe than the populous empire [Russia]?"; A Study of Imaginative Geographies in Art Critical Thought in Argentina during the Belle Époque KU Leuven
Writing Art into Being deals with the development of art criticism in Buenos Aires in the 1870s and 1880s. In this period, artists, critics and politicians viewed art as a sign of national progress, even though the successive liberal governments failed to alter the young nation’s cultural situation that was described as “a dessert.” There were no museums, galleries or official academies. Instead, the primary public spaces exhibiting ...
Promoting The Empire: The Mediatization of The Japanese Foreign Ministry in the Interwar Period, 1919 – 1936 KU Leuven
In August of 1921, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) Department of Information (Gaimushō Jōhōbu) was officially created. Since the second half of the Nineteenth Century, advances in communications technologies had allowed for the global rise of a general public that followed along with the events of domestic and international politics via the consumption of mass media, and which was perceived by political actors as constituting ...
An East-Asian “Sonic Empire”: the record company Nippon Victorand its role in global jazz history, 1927-1954 KU Leuven
Record companies played an important role in disseminating jazz
around the world during the interwar period and can be described as
“empires of sound”. Nippon Victor was founded in 1927 as a
Japanese branch of The Victor Talking Machine Company and
became a prominent player in the East Asian jazz market by using
the Japanese empire as its base. This research aims to study the
changing role of Nippon Victor as an ...
The Attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church Towards Black Slavery in the Portuguese and Belgian Colonial Empires (from midnineteenth century until World War I). KU Leuven
The aim of my research is to compare the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church leaders/authorities and missionaries towards Black Slavery in the Portuguese and Belgian Colonial Empires. With regard to the geographical coverage of my research, I want to focus on the Congo- Angola region. The chronological framework within which I want to situate my research is the period stretching from mid-nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First ...