1 Last checked 16 March 2022

I am a senior research fellow at the University of Huddersfield with a special interest in the art, social and cultural history of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In my current project, recently awarded with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship, I focus on humanitarian organisations who saved the renowned Belgian lace industry in the First World War, while simultaneously ensuring the wartime employment of Belgian lacemakers in German-occupied Belgium and among Belgian refugees in Holland, France and the UK. The produced lace became known as war lace, as its unique iconography referred directly to the conflict.

I started this multidisciplinary and transnational research in the academic year 2018-19 as a Fulbright and honorary Belgian American Educational Foundation scholar at Columbia University and continued it a year later as an academic visitor at the University of Oxford. For my postdoctoral research, I additionally received a one-year postdoctoral mandate by KU Leuven and a travel grant by the Hoover Presidential Foundation.

Prior to this, I completed my PhD in Art History on the professionalisation of amateur artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I tested by means of aristocratic amateur women artists in Belgium (KU Leuven, Belgium, 2018). My forthcoming book Adellijk & artistiek. Amateurkunstenaressen met blauw bloed in België (1815-1914) has been awarded with the Prize 2021 of the Fonds Keingiaert de Gheluvelt.

Besides my academic research, I curated the exhibitions Vrouwen met stijl. Penseelprinsessen in Hingene (Belgium, Kasteel d’Ursel, 2013) and Romantic Landscapes. Marie de Flandre (Belgium, Royal Palace, 2015).