Matteo De Vuyst (°2000, Ghent, Belgium) is a PhD Student at the Department of History at Ghent University. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in History (2021) and his Master of Arts (2022) at Ghent University. In 2023, he was awarded the annual André Schaepdrijver Prize for his Master’s thesis on police-public relations in the industrial city of Aalst during the nineteenth century. His general research interests lie in the social history of crime and criminal justice. His PhD research project on the day-to-day functioning of the law in nineteenth-century Belgium is supervised by prof. dr. Antoon Vrints and prof. dr. Margo De Koster and funded by the FWO – Research Foundation Flanders.