Wout Saelens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Modern and Contemporary History research group at Ghent University and the PoHis – Centre for Political History at the University of Antwerp. His research sits at the intersection of energy, pollution, political ecology, everyday life and environmentalism from below in early modern and modern Western Europe.
In 2021, Saelens obtained his PhD at the University of Antwerp and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with a dissertation on the transition to fossil fuels during the long eighteenth century, viewed from a consumer and material-culture perspective. His junior postdoctoral project, funded by the FWO Research Foundation – Flanders, examined the socio-ecological inequalities, environmental law and popular awareness surrounding smoke pollution in the nineteenth-century city. His current senior postdoctoral project, also funded by the FWO, investigates the testimonies and practices of nineteenth-century working-class anglers, exploring their experience of nature and their everyday environmental consciousness.
Saelens's research has appeared in a monograph with Leuven University Press (Fossil Consumerism: Energy, Ecology and Everyday Life in the Early Modern Low Countries) and has appeared in leading international journals, including Past & Present, Environment and History, the History Workshop Journal, the Economic History Review and Urban History.
