Curriculum vitae

I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Helsinki’s Department of Cultures and its European Area & Cultural Studies unit since 1 September 2019. Until 31 August 2022, I worked on the French-Algerian axis of Josephine Hoegaerts’ ERC-project CALLIOPE (“Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire”). Trained as a historian of Political Culture & National Identities in the Low Countries (MA, Leiden University) and modern French political history (PhD, University of Antwerp), I have a broad interest in Western European parliaments and discourse, democracy, representation, and citizenship, as well as “ordinary” people’s narratives and experiences of inclusion and exclusion, in the 19^th to 20^th centuries. After the publication of my monograph (Ordinary Citizens and the French Third Republic), I started pursuing a better understanding of France’s Third and Fourth Republican dynamics of empire, and the French authorities’ treatment of Algerian Muslims in particular. My Research Council of Finland project (2022–2025) aims to do so by investigating petitions sent from within Algeria to the French Lower House and the latter’s subsequent responses (1870s–1950s).

(Find my full CV here.)

Research interests

Western European political culture between microhistory and global history (19th-20th centuries); parliamentary culture(s); formal and informal political communication and interactions; political discourse and performance; history of democracy, representation and citizenship; political concepts and conceptual history; philosophy and theory of history; modern French history; French imperial and colonial history; history of petitions; subaltern political knowledge; resistance from below and from within institutional frameworks; history of experiences, emotions, sense(s) and nonsense; histories of the unspeakable and "apophasis" in the archives

Education information

Degrees

• PhD of History (University of Antwerp, 2019)
• MA of Arts in History: Political Culture and National Identities in the Low Countries (Leiden University, 2014)
• MA of Arts in History (University of Antwerp, 2013)
• BA of Education: Secondary School Teaching of History, French as a Foreign Language, and Biology (Karel de Grote College, Antwerp, 2009)

Most recent teaching responsibility (in the 2025 spring term)

Interdisciplinary literature and discussion seminar geared toward MA-students in Area & Cultural Studies, European and Nordic Studies, History, and Intercultural Encounters: "Power, Peripheries, and Cultural Transfer in Europe" (with cases from the 19^th century to the present day).