Publicaties

The renewed prominence of Confucianism in contemporary China is a remarkable and complex phenomenon. Once vilified as the main obstacle standing in the way of modernization and condemned as the supreme symbol of a backwards, feudal ideology destined for the infamous ‘dustbins of history’, Confucius seems to have made a surprising comeback on the Chinese scene. During most of the 20th century, his name was most often heard on the mainland in the ...

This paper is a reflexive essay that re-imagines the historical agency of what traditionally tends to be subsumed under the phenomenon of the Mamluk state. It is argued that the notions of state in modern research and of dawla in contemporary texts remain an issue of related analytical confusion. Engaging with this confusion in the generalising fashion of a historical sociology of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action, this essay proposes ...

The history of Belgian feminism before World War I has hitherto been written almost exclusively from within a national framework. Using the perspective of 'entangled history', this article focuses on the forgotten transnational influences that shaped the pre-war movement for women's rights in Belgium, starting with the Dutch and French political transfers that triggered the birth of organised feminism in the early 1890s, followed by the ...

The institutional and political history of the Zionist movement in Belgium prior to 1940. The second part focuses on the history of the Zionist Federation of Belgium and the Belgian branch of the Jewish national Fund (KKL).

This article summarizes an analysis of a recent piece of Flemish history writing originating as a politically formulated identity-strengthening project. The recruited academics carrying out the project explicitly reject a political positioning in support of such identitarian goals. Though they succeed in establishing plausible deniability, the question is: Does the end product meet the political goals, in spite of the authors’ distancing ...

Medieval views on rulers from the past were often politically instrumentalised in the service of contemporary interests. In the recent historiography on medieval Flanders, the reconstruction of how 'historical truth' changed over time to cater for topical needs has primarily been examined from the perspective of 'social' or 'communicative' memories, which were orally transmitted over a short period of time. This line of research followed the ...