Christophe Verbruggen is Director of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities and Associate Professor in the research unit Social History since 1750. He is also a member of the Institute of Public History and the Centre for the History of Science at Ghent University. He directs CLARIAH-VL, the current Flemish contribution to the European research infrastructure DARIAH, Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. As an historian, Verbruggen is specialized in environmental history, the social history of intellectuals and history of ideas in the 19th and 20th century. He also published on the use of social network analysis in historical research. Ongoing projects include the Horizon 2020 project CLS-Infra (computational literary studies) and the digitally enabled EOS (FWO-FNRS) Project “Pyramids and Progress. Belgian Expansionism and the Making of Egyptology 1830-1952”, “The road to Alexandria. The sensation of landscapes in European travel writing, 1919-1939” (FWO – senior research Project with Hans Vandevoorde). He is currently setting up a new research line into environmental history and a research line on geo-humanities. A final focus area is digital public history. A final area of focus within his research is digital public history. Here, the Ghent Mapped project (2019-2023) serves a laboratory for future developments and research projects.
In the context of a long-term FED-Twin collaboration between Ghent University and the KBR, Royal Library of Belgium (2019-2029), he is setting up a Digital Research Lab and knowledge network for the study of Belgium’s digitised and born-digital historical, literary, and cultural heritage of the 19th - 21st centuries. Related ongoing projects Verbruggen (co)supervises are VKC Enriched (with IDLab), Computational Literary Studies (CLS-Infra-Horizon Europe) and Tetrarchs (CHANSE-FWO).
