Jeroen Deploige (PhD Ghent University, 2002) is professor of Medieval History. His research and teaching focus on the cultural, social and religious history of the high (and to a lesser extent also late) medieval Low Countries and adjacent regions.
In his projects and publications, three fields of interest can be distinguished. Firstly, building on his PhD research, he is interested in the relations between medieval narrative and social history, with a particular focus on hagiographical and visionary texts. Secondly, he has developed a number of small-scale studies and projects dealing with a range of topics such as visionary experience and gender, memory practices, emotions, textual communities etc. Thirdly and most recently, he is studying the perception and performance of social identities in the nascent urban societies of the High Middle Ages, relying on documentary material as well as on narrative and literary sources. In this research, he is collaborating with Jeff Rider (Wesleyan University) and Walter Simons (Dartmouth College), and with Jan Dumolyn (Ghent University).
Jeroen Deploige is also directing projects in the field of Digital Humanities. These have resulted in the databases Narrative Sources (2009) and Diplomata Belgica (2015) as well as in stylometric experiments in collaboration with Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp), Sara Moens and Wim Verbaal (Ghent University). He is also the Ghent spokesperson in the Time Machine FET-Flagship/LSRI CSA project (H2020 - 2019-2020).
Jeroen Deploige is the promoter-spokesperson of the Pirenne Consortium for Medieval Studies, an interdisciplinary research consortium recognised and funded by the Ghent University Research Fund (BOF) and aimed at realising societal impact. He is a member of the Belgian Commission royale d'Histoire/Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis and of the editorial boards of the series Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis (Brepols) and Mediaevalia Lovaniensia (Leuven University Press). He is also involved in the research network Interfaces, ran by Lars Boje Mortensen and Elizabeth Tyler within the framework of the Centre for Medieval Literature (Universities of Southern Denmark and York). He has been Fellow of the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts at the Royal Academy in Brussels (2012) and of the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome (2016), and Visiting Scholar in Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University (2016).
