Vicky Van Bockhaven earned her PhD in World Art Studies in 2014 from the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK. She also holds MAs in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Catholic University of Leuven and in World Art History from the University of East Anglia and UGent. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the Leopard men of Eastern Congo (ca. 1890-1940), exploring how the colonial "mythology" of leopard men diverged from the complex social realities of the colony.
Currently, Vicky Van Bockhaven is a Professor at Ghent University and a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), working on the project "Transformative Heritage: Customary Governance, Community Building, and Digital Restitution in Contemporary Northeast Congo." She has successfully written and contributed to several funded BRAIN multi-researcher projects, including CONGOCONNECT (2015-2019) and AFRISURGE (2020-2025), and is a partner in the recently funded BRAIN project CONGOLINES (2021-2025).
Vicky Van Bockhaven has published in prestigious journals such as the Journal of African History and the Journal of Eastern African Studies, including a special issue on customary authority. She is currently preparing two monographs: one on her research on leopard men and another on her findings from the CONGOCONNECT project, provisionally titled "Revisiting Rebellion in Northeast Congo (1850-today)," which examines the role of closed associations in the region's political culture.
Before her academic career, Vicky Van Bockhaven gained extensive experience as a researcher and curator at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren) and the MAS (Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp). This experience allowed her to build a robust network with various institutions and gain hands-on expertise in using ethnographic collections for research and teaching. She has established strong connections with academic and cultural institutions across Africa, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she conducts significant fieldwork and collaborative projects. Vicky Van Bockhaven is currently working on decolonial museology, collaborating with source communities of the RMCA's collections in Northeast Congo.
