I am Senior Full Professor of Medieval History at Ghent University, with a cross-appointment (2024–2026) at the University of Toronto. My research explores the religious and cultural history of Western Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, with particular focus on community life, discourses of reform, memory and identity formation, hagiography, the reception of the medieval past, and the history of textual criticism and editorial practice. Increasingly, I embed this work in interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues at Ghent University and internationally.
My scholarship has been recognized with several awards and fellowships. Ghent University’s Special Research Fund has awarded me four five-year research professorships (2005, 2010, 2015, 2025). I received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation (2012), was named Laureate in Humanities by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium (2013), and in 2024 was awarded the Sixteenth-Century Society’s Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize for the best article in English on the early modern history of France.
I have held fellowships and visiting professorships at Clare Hall, Cambridge; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar; the Flemish Academic Center, Brussels; the Institute for Advanced Study, Indiana University; the University of Bristol; the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome; and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan/Brescia, among others. I have delivered numerous keynote and invited lectures across Europe, North America, and Asia.
Research output
My publications include eight monographs, among them Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 (Cornell, 2013); Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages (Cornell, 2015); Dark Age Nunneries (Cornell, 2018); Medieval Monasticisms (De Gruyter, 2020); and Dismantling the Medieval (Brepols, 2021). I have co-edited critical editions, including (with Diane Reilly) the Acta Synodi Atrebatensis (Brepols, 2014), and I have edited or co-edited numerous collective volumes. My work also appears in leading journals across medieval and early modern history.
Projects
I have led or co-led more than a dozen research projects funded by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO), Ghent University’s Special Research Fund (BOF), and other bodies. Current projects include Hagiographic Entanglements of the Long Tenth Century (with Prof. Julie Birkholz, GhentCDH) and Regional Variation in Latin Hagiography of the Long Tenth Century (with Prof. Anne Breitbarth, UGent Linguistics). These collaborations are laying the foundations for new research infrastructures in the Humanities. I also have extensive experience supervising PhD and postdoctoral researchers.
Service (for internal service, click on the separate tab on this page)
Beyond academia, I am committed to outreach and public engagement. Most recently I co-curated the exhibition Judith, A Carolingian Princess in Ghent? at the Sint-Pietersabdij (October 2024–January 2025).
My external service includes membership of editorial and advisory boards for journals and book series, chairing the series Communitas (Brepols), and serving on expert panels for national and European funding agencies.
