Thijs Dekeukeleire is a Doctoral Candidate at Ghent University's Department of Art History and the University of Antwerp's Department of History. In his PhD dissertation, he examines the transformation of the artistic male nude in fin-de-siècle Belgium, in light of the changing views of masculinity and male sociability which are often said to have precipitated a 'crisis of masculinity'. He focuses on works by the artists Jean Delville, Jef Lambeaux, Charles Van der Stappen and Arsène Matton. He is interested broadly in the intersection of visual arts, gender and race in the long nineteenth century.
Thijs previously interned at the Museum of Art in Ostend and at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and taught art history at the Ghent School of Arts.
Thijs is currently co-editing a volume of essays on male bonds in nineteenth-century art, to be published in 2020 by Leuven University Press. The volume is a follow-up to the conference Male Bonds in Nineteenth-Century Art, which he helped organize in 2018 along with the European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art (ESNA), with the support of, inter alia, the Museum of Fine Arts - Ghent, the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) and the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD). He is also a board member of XIX, the Belgian intermuseum and interuniversity research platform for nineteenth-century art.
