Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt (°1995) is a PhD Student at Ghent University (2018-2023, FWO aspirant) working at the intersection of historiography, the theory of history, the history of European integration, and the sociology of knowledge. She has obtained her BA in History at the University of Leuven (2016), holds an MA in History from Ghent University (2017) and an MA in the Social Sciences from The University of Chicago (2018), where she held a Fulbright Student Grant and B.A.E.F. Baillet Latour Fellowship (2017-2018). Marie-Gabrielle has also been awarded the André Schaepdrijver Prize (2018) and received a Vibeke Sørensen Grant from the European University Institute (2021).
Marie-Gabrielle's general research interests lie in the history of late 20th and 21st century historiography; in short, asking how historians' study of the past has changed over the past seventy years in practice, form, and function. Her current work touches on those questions by focusing on European Union sponsorship of historical research between 1970 and today. She is especially interested in the production and institutionalization of ideas about valuable knowledge and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of knowing the past through peer review and selection mechanisms, as well as the changing relationships between the academy, funding organizations, and the state.
Since March 2020, she has also been working on a collaborative side-project on ‘populist historical reason’ with Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh en Walderez Ramalho, analyzing the specific ways populists deal with the past and the way populists think about "knowing" history. A co-edited volume on Claiming the People's Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century will appear at Cambridge University Press in 2023. For a short synopsis of the project, click here.
