SHOC research group - Vrije Universiteit Brussel

SHOC member Leonie Vanlerberghe recently led an engaging workshop on “Gender in Personal Documents” at the Spring Conference of the Royal Netherlands Historical Society (KNHG)🎓, together with Stefan Kras (history teacher and PhD researcher) and Jessie Baerts (Master student Gender & Diversity, Ugent).

Leonie shared compelling excerpts from autobiographies of socialist workers📖, preserved at the Amsab Institute for Social History. Stefan introduced letters written in 1943 by 17- and 18-year-old boys forced into labour in Germany, offering a poignant glimpse into their correspondence with friends back home in the Netherlands. Jessie, in turn, invited participants to read along with the diary of a woman from Ghent during the First World War 📝.

Together, these sources opened up vivid perspectives on the lives of individuals that are usually underrepresented in the evidence!

New vacancy!

We are looking for 2 doctoral candidates to conduct research on the Brussels construction sector as a nexus of labour, materials, and capital, from the nineteenth century to the present. The PhD trajectories are part of the broader interdisciplinary research project ‘Flows in the Construction Sector. Urban-Environmental Histories of Labour, Materials, and Money’, a collaboration between the VUB research groups VUB Architectural Engineering Lab, Social History of Capitalism, and Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research.

For more info: https://shoc.research.vub.be/en/vacancy-docotral-researcher-flows-in-the-construction-sector-urban-environmental-histories-of-labour

🏆 Quiz champions! 🏆

Once again, our SHOC members showed they’re experts in more than just history at the annual VUB staff quiz. Three SHOC teams competed this year, and one of them—featuring Ward Leloup, Jolien Gijbels, William Torbeyns, Brent Huygh and Thijs Costers, better known as “The Quiztorians”—even brought home the trophy.
As tradition has it, they’ll have the honour of organising next year’s quiz.

Congratulations to our colleagues on a well-earned victory—and see you all next year for the SHOC-organised quiz! 👏🎉

On 26 May, the Faculty Research Day brought together PhD students from the Faculty of Languages and Humanities for a full day of exchange, inspiration and academic discovery🎓✨ It was a great opportunity to connect with fellow researchers and explore each other’s work. Several SHOC PhDs and postdocs were in attendance, alongside their supervisors. We were also proud to see SHOC’s students in the Talent for Research honours programme presenting their poster projects:

- ‎Arne Vinck presented his project “Mapping Justice,” in which he explores new ways of visualising legal practices.
- ‎Daan Huysman introduced his work on improving access to the Colonial Military Court Archives of Burundi.
- ‎Noémie Tomaszynski presented her research on mobility in the Middle Ages, focusing on social organisation and diversity in fifteenth-century Bologna.
- ‎Axel Van der Maelen showcased how the Transkribus tool can be used to analyse eighteenth-century case files of the Drossaard of Brabant.

Developing and presenting an academic poster is an important part of the training programme, helping students communicate their research clearly and concisely—an essential academic skill! 💡

Last Tuesday, 19 May, SHOC celebrated its third anniversary with an inspiring lecture by Prof. Andreas Malm (Lund University). Titled “The Political Ecology of Charlemagne – Or, What, if Anything, is Special about Capitalism?”, it offered a first glimpse of a foundational chapter from Andreas’ forthcoming monograph on popular histories of the wilderness.

Using Charlemagne and the expansion of the Carolingian Empire as a metaphorical focal point, Andreas took us on a historical-philosophical journey exploring how human intervention in the landscape—especially deforestation—helped consolidate power and facilitate the domination of oppressed populations. Nicolas Schroeder from our francophone sister institution ULB acted as a formidable sparring partner for Andreas.

We can confidently say that the audience thoroughly enjoyed both the thought-provoking lecture and the engaging discussion that followed.

Recently, our SHOC colleague Brent Huygh published his first academic article, titled "Commercialisation from below: the Brussels gateway roads in the eighteenth century", in the journal "History of Retailing and Consumption". In this article, Brent sets out to answer the question: what role did traffic flows in eighteenth-century Brussels play in shaping the urban (retail) landscape?

During the early modern period, consumer behaviour significantly changed in many parts of Western Europe. Rural populations increasingly consumed urban goods, while also producing in an increasingly market-oriented manner. As such, they were important drivers of urban expansion, notably strengthening middle groups like craftsmen and retailers. However, the spatial effects of this so-called ‘urbanization from below’ remain unstudied. By comparing the 1702 and 1802 censuses in Brussels, this article reveals how gateway roads, linking city gates to the centre, accommodated a significantly larger share of urban commerce by the start of the nineteenth century than a century before. On these gateway roads, increasingly busy traffic displaced poorer crafts such as textile production, while attracting merchants and retailers. These mainly sold non-durable, colonial goods, like tea, spices and to***co, which, not coincidentally, fulfilled a prominent role in rural consumption patterns as well. Similarly, consistent differences in the degree of commercialization between the gateway roads can be linked to the extent of the urban hinterland in the corresponding direction. Importantly, by pointing to external consumers as a key factor in reshaping the urban fabric, this article also adds to existing literature on retail locations in the early modern city.

Article link: https://lnkd.in/erEd7GU2

Image: Hendrik van Wel, view on the Halle Gate and Brussels, ca. 1700.

📣 Call for Papers: People on the Move in Late Medieval Europe 🌍

SHOC member Bart Lambert is guest editing a special issue of the peer reviewed, Web of Science–indexed journal Histories 📖 on late medieval human mobility.

Researchers working on migration, mobility or movement within Europe — or to Europe — from the 13th to the early 16th centuries are warmly invited to submit a contribution! 🚶

🗓️ Submission is possible any time until September 2027.
🔗 Full details, including potential topics: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/histories/special_issues/8L32Y494P1

In the beginning of April, SHOC-member Charlotte Van Riet attended the UK Archaeological Sciences Conference 2026, hosted by the University of Bristol. She presented the first results of her PhD research in a poster titled "Isotopes and Urbanisation". In her research, Charlotte studies the first medieval city-dwellers of Ypres. Within the first part of her PhD, she examines changing patterns of diet and mobility with the aim of understanding how these shifts can be linked to historical dynamics of mobility, trade, urban development... Dynamics that drastically changed the medieval landscape of the Low Countries.
Her poster was also awarded with the 2nd poster prize, sponsored by the Journal of Archaeological Science.

📘 SHOC‑collega’s Dennis De Vriese en Matthijs De Graeve traden mee op als editors van het nieuwe boek "Brusselse plaatsnamen". Dit werk brengt de herkomst van meer dan 5.000 straatnamen in kaart en toont hoe historische keuzes, lokale gewoontes en maatschappelijke evoluties het straatbeeld blijven vormen. Van hardnekkige volksnamen tot de beperkte zichtbaarheid van nieuwe vernoemingen: de dynamiek achter Brusselse toponymie blijkt complexer dan gedacht.

In dit interview met Bruzz licht Dennis deze bevindingen toe — een gesprek dat zeker de moeite waard is om te beluisteren!

https://www.bruzz.be/actua/stedenbouw/boek-over-brusselse-straatnamen-maar-een-vernoeming-naar-persoon-met-maghrebijnse-roots-2026-03-24

🚨 New publication alert!

In her latest article for Historical Research, Imma Petito reconsiders Federico da Montefeltro’s investiture into the Order of the Garter, offering a fresh interpretation of the diplomatic strategies linking Naples, Rome, and England in 1474–5. Federico emerges not only as a leading figure of the Italian Renaissance, but as a central actor within the wider diplomatic networks of the Kingdom of Naples.

“Federico da Montefeltro, architect of all undertakings of Ferrante” re-dates the Grottaferrata ceremony to early 1475 and reveals how what appears as courtly pageantry was in fact a carefully staged act of Aragonese diplomacy. Drawing on Milanese dispatches, Urbino correspondence, and curial records, the article reconstructs Ferrante I’s winter progress and the mission of English envoys Bartholomew Rivers and John Sante, showing how ritual, gifts, and political theatre coordinated an anti-French strategy across courts.

📖 A must-read for scholars of late medieval diplomacy, political ritual, and fifteenth century transregional networks!
🔗

Federico da Montefeltro, architect of all undertakings of Ferrante: the diplomatic policy of Edward IV of York between Naples and Rome, 1474–5* Abstract. This article re-dates Federico da Montefeltro’s investiture into the Order of the Garter to early 1475 and reframes it as Aragonese-brokered dipl