Department Faculty

"I am a social and cultural historian of Western Europe (19th-20th centuries) with an interest in cities, the middle classes, civilian experiences of war, and nationalism. My research has first focused on 19th-century urban history, with articles on prostitution, city growth and migration, and urban planning. My first monograph studies foreign migration to Brussels in the 1840s and 1850s, when the fast-growing city became a national capital. It emphasizes the complexity of the urban labour market and the intricate choreography of migrants’ moves.

"I then started research on Belgium in the First World War, a multifaceted and crucial episode on which little recent work existed. After publishing a prize-winning monograph in 1997, I continued work on this subject, and am writing a book on the Belgian experience of occupation - with attendant issues of resistance, accommodation, profiteering, and collaboration - and its long-term memory.

"My next project entails a return to the “long 19th century” with an explicitly comparative perspective: it is a study of rentiership as a bourgeois ambition in Western Europe from c1790 to c1930. L ess a study of wealth than of the ambivalence of ambition, the project seeks to contribute to our understanding of 19th-century perspectives on the market, on competition, ambition and careers, on mediocrity versus maximization, on obligations facing the self in society.

"I have also written essays on themes in cultural studies (including 19th-century literature and World War One); these have been collected in a 2002 volume."