A multidisciplinary
team

Sarah Barthélemy holds a joint doctorate in history from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France). Her research and publications focus on the history of gender and Catholicism, the history of religious institutions, and the construction and politics of women’s sanctity. She is the author of Le genre de la Société de Jésus, published by the Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2024. She is also a convening committee founding member of ISHWRA, the International Scholars of the History of Women Religious Association.

Eric Bousmar got his PhD in History at UCLouvain and he also holds a Diploma in Medieval Studies from KU Leuven. His studies the Low Countries society and polities, esp. during the Burgundian and Early Habsbourg period (15^th-16^th c.), from a gender, political and cultural perspective. He is also active in the field of Historiography and Memory Studies (19^th-21^st c.).

Jean-Marie Cauchies is a renowned expert on the history of the Low Countries, esp. the county of Hainaut, on the history of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy, their Habsbourg successors and theirs dominions, and on the history of medieval and early modern legislation. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, of the Royal Commission for History (CRH), and of the Royal Commission for the Publication of Ancient Laws and Ordinances of Belgium (CRALO). He was made a doctor honoris causa by the University of Haute-Alsace and the University of Lyon.

Emilie is a F.R.S.-FNRS Research Fellow and is conducting a doctoral research under the supervision of Annette Ruelle and Wim Decock. Her research project entitled “Privilegia mulierum, from Roman law to scholarly practice in the 16th-18th centuries: between equity and equality, an essay on the relevance of a categorial law of persons” aims to to examine the Roman foundations and early developments of the privilegia mulierum by conducting a theoretical analysis, based on a corpus of scholarly sources from sixteenth to eighteenth century Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, from a comparative law perspective. More broadly, her research project also aims to examine, from a meta-legal and historical point of view, the paradigms used to consider the law of persons, and more specifically women’s rights, in the light of the tension running through our legal systems between individualisation and generalisation by law.

FSR Fellow and former secondary school teacher, Xavier Dabe is conducting a doctoral research project titled “In foro interno in foro externo: Genesis of a (con)federal principle in the context of European integration in Belgium (1970-1995).” His research focuses on the political and constitutional history of Belgium and its connections with European integration from a multi-level governance perspective in contemporary history.

Philippe Desmette is Professor of Early Modern History at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels. His research focuses on three main areas. Religious history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, from the point of view of both experience and institutional organisation (confraternities, preceptual festivals, miracles, sanctity, etc.). Historiography as a revelation of historical thought that is both involved and evolving. The history of Hainaut with a view to enhancing the contribution of regional and local work to historical science.

Hervé Katolo holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political History from the University of Lubumbashi (DRC) and a Master’s degree in Political History from the University of Lubumbashi (DRC). He is currently a PhD candidate in History at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels, where his dissertation focuses on: “The evolution of representations of Katangese material culture: the case of the Tabwa and Yeke communities (1850 to 2020)”.

Holding a PhD in philosophy (ULB-F.R.S.-FNRS, 2000), Sophie Klimis teaches since 2006 at UCLouvain Humanities and Law Faculties. She is interested in the social and political institutions and imaginaries of Ancient Greece and the critical light they may shed on our contemporary neoliberal world. Recent publications : Penser, délibérer, juger : pour une philosophie de la justice en acte(s) (2018) ; Le penser en travail. Castoriadis et le labyrinthe de la création humaine (2020) ; Éveiller à la pensée. Au détour des Grecs (2021) ; Mawda v. Medusa. Donner un visage à la criminalisation des migrants en Europe (2024).

Romain Landmeters conducts research in contemporary history and teaches humanities in the Faculty of Law. His doctoral research traces the history of Burundian, Congolese and Rwandan migrants in Brussels between 1945 and 1975. At the same time, he is studying the place of the history of colonisation in teaching and in the public spaces in Belgium.

Caroline holds graduate and post-graduate degrees in law and in linguistics/translation studies from the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham and a PhD in legal history from the University of Ghent. Her research activities as a university researcher (Durham, Brussels, Ghent, Bonn, Oslo, Louvain) and her work as a legal expert and specialist consultant for EU and international agencies, have taken her across a number of fields. Today her interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of history, law and language, applying linguistic analysis to study legal history and concepts, comparative law and translation. She has particular interests in gender studies and in the late medieval/early modern period.

Vincent is a FNRS Research Fellow and is conducting doctoral research under the supervision of Aurore François (Larhis – IACCHOS) and Xavier Rousseaux (LHS/CHDJ – INCAL) at UCLouvain. His research project, entitled “Home with a head held high? Between trauma, stigma and recognition: Belgian soldiers detained in Fresnes prison (1914-1918) and their post-war life trajectories”, focuses on a blind spot in the social history of incarceration by bringing together the history of confinement with the history of war and social trajectories. The aim of this study is to retrace the lives of Belgian soldiers sentenced by the military justice system and deported to France during the First World War. In this regard, it seeks to understand their lived experiences and personal narratives, both during the conflict and in the post-war transition, including their reintegration into civilian life during the interwar period.

Hajar Oulad Ben Taib conducts research in contemporary history and is a teaching assistant. Her doctoral research focuses on the history of traditional Catholic women’s organizations and their role in supporting Moroccan and Turkish immigrant women in Brussels from 1964 to 1984. She is particularly interested in the issue of representation and the imaginaries constructed around ‘the other.’ She also participates in the public debate on the promotion of the history of migrations.

Holding a PhD from the universities of Lille and Namur, Antoine Renglet is invited professor of modern history and historical criminology. He was visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and postdoc researcher at the Goethe Universität at Frankfurt and at Ghent Universiteit. His research focuses on urban policing in Europe from the 18th to the 20th century. He has published Polices, villes et sécurité sous la Révolution et l’Empire. L’ordre public urbain dans l’espace belge, 1780-1814 (PUR, 2021) and Policing Cities in Napoleonic Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022).

As a specialist in the long-term history of crime and justice in the West, I have published on the prosecution of crimes, judgements and sentences. Among my publications Le pénal dans tous ses États. Justice, États et sociétés en Europe (XIIe-XXe siècle) (1997) ; Deux siècles de justice belge. Encyclopédie historique de la justice belge (2015); A global history of crime in the Age of Enlightenment (2023). Scènes de crimes. La photographie policière, témoin de l’enquête judiciaire (2023).

Annette Ruelle studied Law and Classical Philology at ULB and is currently a professor of Roman Law at UCLouvain. Her research focuses on Roman Private Law, with a particular interest in Property Law, and on the way in which “Religion”, at the various levels of ancient civic Religions, Catholic Church, and Protestantism, has had an impact on the formation and the development of the civilian tradition.

Camille Rutsaert is a PhD student under the direction of Eric Bousmar and Gilles Lecuppre. Beside her teaching, she specializes in her research in medieval gender history through the study of women in power positions in the Low Countries during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Her thesis concentrates on the duchess Joan of Brabant (1322-1406) and tends to situate her in her historical as well as her historiographical context.

As a F.R.S.-FNRS Research Fellow, Nicolas Ruys is a PhD Student under the supervision of Wim Decock. His research project is titled: “Princely pardon to the rescue of debtors. Letters of atterminatio, status, securitas corporis and cessio bonorum in the Spanish Netherlands (ca. 1531-1700)”. It aims to demonstrate how the Habsburg sovereign’s power of grace played a major role within the principalities of the Low Countries in matters of insolvency and bankruptcy, by assisting debtors in financial distress.

Wout Vandermeulen, a KU Leuven graduate (2021), is a PhD candidate under Wim Decock (UC Louvain) and Wouter Druwé (KU Leuven). He studies the evolution of ideas on economic dominance in 16th-17th century jurists and theologians, and a potential link to German ordoliberalism (1920-1960), within a cotutelle framework.

Fanny Verslype graduated in history from UCLouvain (2018), with a semester at Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile). After teaching secondary school, she began a PhD at UCLouvain. under the supervision of Xavier Rousseaux, Aurore François and Jérôme de Brouwer (ULB). Her research focuses on Belgian lawyers during World War I. Since 2022, coinciding with the centenary of women’s access to the bar in Belgium, she has also explored gender issues in the legal profession.

Pierre-Olivier de Broux is a professor of history and law at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, specializing in the history of public law, institutions, and human rights at the Belgian, European, and international levels, as well as in the political history of contemporary Belgium. From a pedagogical perspective, he is committed to introducing students to the historian’s tools, which are essential for any citizen navigating the rise of the information society. He also seeks to expose future legal professionals to the practical application of law and the intersection of law and facts, as well as history. On the scientific front, his research focuses on the history of economic public law and colonial law, as well as the close relationships between law and history (history in courtrooms, the law of history, memory laws, etc.). After serving as Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles from 2018 to 2023, Pierre-Olivier de Broux was appointed Judge at the Belgian Council of State.

Serge Dauchy is an expert on the history of the Ancient Régime Parliaments (Paris and Flanders), procedural law, and colonial justice in early modern colonial context (Louisiane and Québéc). A part-time professor at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, he is also a CNRS Research Director at the University of Lille (France) and a member of the Royal Commission for the Publication of Ancient Laws and Ordinances of Belgium (CRALO).

Wim Decock is a professor of legal history, Roman law and comparative law at UCLouvain’s Faculty of Law and Criminology. He also teaches legal history part-time at the University of Liège. Before joining UCLouvain in 2021, he was a research professor at KULeuven (2013-2021) and led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt (2012-2014). His research explores the global interplay of legal, economic and theological thought in the early modern period.

I am a historian of war in the late medieval and Early Modern Low Countries. My PhD-thesis (Université libre de Bruxelles) re-examined the role of gunpowder artillery in Burgundian-Habsburg state-formation. After 10 years specialising in political, economic, social, and diplomatic history of war at Oxford (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, among other grants), I joined UCLouvain in 2025 on a WelCHANGE project (FNRS) to examine how late medieval European societies sought to control military violence and started to define and prosecute war crimes.

PhD in History (2003), his research covers the history of Belgium from 1500 to 1830, with a focus on specific approaches: institutions, politics, collective identities, public opinion, international relations, historiography, comparative history of nationalisms, history of cartography, and historical geography. Additionally, he serves as the operational director at the National Archives and is a member of the Royal Historical Commission of Belgium.

Paul Fontaine is a classical philologist and archaeologist specialising in pre-Roman Italy and Republican Rome. He has published numerous works in the fields of topography and military architecture, as well as papers on Etruscan and Roman epigraphy and iconography. Formerly director of the Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, he is the editor of the proceedings of the international conferences L’Étrurie et l’Ombrie avant Rome. Cité et territoire (2010) and Fortificazioni arcaiche del Latium Vetus e dell’Etruria meridionale (2016). He also took an active interest in representations of Antiquity in publications for young people

Florence Liard holds a PhD in History and Archaeology from UCLouvain. After a postdoc experience at the British School at Athens (2017), Université Bordeaux Montaigne (2018-2020) and Universiteit Leiden (2020), she is now an invited professor of Ancient History and Archaeology. Her research concerns the affordable imitations of metalware in Ancient Greece, and the social and political impacts of their use in the symposion. She regularly publishes research results in Hesperia, and she recently edited a volume on Innovation in Classical Antiquity (Fervet Opus, PUL, 2025).

As a F.R.S.-FNRS research fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain under the supervision of Wim Decock and Jérôme de Brouwer, and as a part-time lecturer at the Université d’Artois, my research focuses on the history of Belgian penal codification from 1570 to 1867. With a doctorate in law (ULille, 2022) and a doctorate in history (UCLouvain, 2022), I wrote a thesis on the first project of the criminal code of the Austrian Netherlands, under the supervision of François Quastana, Xavier Rousseaux and Wim Decock.

Marcelo has specialized in international taxation, with a master’s degree in both Fiscal and International Law in Chile and Germany. He has taught at Chilean universities. Marcelo has contributed with scientific literature to international (IFA) and Chilean journals in tax issues. He has combined his technical expertise with studies in economics and in philosophy and history of law. Marcelo is currently doing a PhD at UCLouvain on the influence of German Neo-Scholasticism of the XIX and XX centuries in legal and economic matters

Bérengère Piret teaches contemporary history and archival science at UCLouvain. She is also a senior researcher at the State Archives of Belgium, where she contributes to the management of archives related to colonisation. For over fifteen years, she has examined the colonial repressive apparatus established in present-day Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda. After studying the prison institutions of Congo, she focused on the colonial judicial system. She also explores colonial archives as a research subject.

I obtained my Master’s degree in law at the University of Law and Politics of China, where I wrote a dissertation on the relationship between early judicial review in the United States and natural law. I am currently pursuing a PhD in legal history at UCLouvain, focusing on the late medieval and Reformation periods. During my Master’s studies, I researched the conception of sovereignty underlying American judicial review. In the process, I sought to trace the origins of the contemporary legal system, in particular the emergence of the modern concept of sovereignty. In reading Anthony Black’s work on the spirit of the medieval guilds, I noticed the importance he attaches to Althusius and discovered a specific feature of his conception of sovereignty: he emphasises both the will and the autonomy of the individual while insisting on unity with the political order. I want to understand how he manages to reconcile these elements in order to deepen my understanding of the nature and evolution of the modern concept of sovereignty.

Nathalie Tousignant holds a Ph.D. in history from Université de Laval (Quebec, 1995), and is Professor of Contemporary History at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, where she is also attached to the Institute for European Studies and co-director of CRHiDI. Her research falls within the field of postcolonial studies, analyzing relations between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of Congo from the angles of visual anthropology, the colonial imaginary and legal history practices in a colonial context.

François Vankerkhoven holds a master degree both in early modern history and in public law. His research which focuses on the rule of archdukes Albert and Isabella in the early modern low countries explores its legal and institutional history as well as related identity building seen through historiography, especially in Hainaut.

Quentin Verreycken conducts research on the political, social, and cultural history of Western Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on crime, justice, and violence in the context of war. He is notably the author of Crimes et gens de guerre au Moyen Âge (Puf, 2023) and has published articles in the Revue historique, French Historical Studies, Crimes, Histoire & Sociétés, and the International Review of Penal Law.

Christian Via Balole is a PhD Student at UCLouvain and the UCBukavu (DR Congo). FRESH Fellow – FRS-FNRS, his doctoral research focuses on the legal issue of forced labour in the Congo from the colonial era to the present day. He graduated in law from the UCBukavu (2019) and obtained an advanced master’s in international human Rights Law from the UCLouvain (2022). His research interests include social law, colonial law, postcolonial studies, legal history and international human rights law.

Florenz Volkaert is a F.R.S.-FNRS Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLouvain. He holds a PhD and MA in Law from Ghent University and an LL.M/MSc. in Law and Economics from UHamburg, EURotterdam, and Indira Gandhi Institute. His doctoral research on commercial treaties (1860–1914) earned the 2022 ESIL Young Scholar Prize. He was a BAEF Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale and a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History. His work explores the history of international economic law.

Laetitia Xhrouet, holding a degree in medieval history (specializing in history communication) from UCLouvain, is currently pursuing an interuniversity PhD under the supervision of Tania Van Hemelryck (UCLouvain) and Éric Bousmar (Université Saint-Louis – Brussels). Her research primarily focuses on the historiography of the Burgundian period as represented in the literature of Belgium and the former Netherlands. She is currently developing a doctoral project as part of the interuniversity project Édition critique et recontextualisation historique des Chroniques de Hainaut de Jean Wauquelin.