I am associate professor of History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, member of the Social History of Capitalism research group (SHOC), and the Principal Investigator of FORAGENCY. After obtaining my PhD in Contemporary History in 2016 from the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, I was appointed as short-term postdoctoral fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch-Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2017. Later that year, I joined the Comparing the Copperbelt project at the University of Oxford, as associate researcher in the social history of Haut-Katanga. I left this position October 2018 to joint the ranks of VUB.
My research interests include history from below, and microhistorical approaches of colonial Central Africa. I essentially studied vernacular experiences of and responses to state power and to capitalism, be they in the context of interwar palm oil concessions in the Kwilu, or in the mining communities of 1970’s Southeastern Zaire. FORAGENCY stemmed from my desire to expand these research prospects by including the more-than-human world, and by focusing on activities that remained elusive and/or peripheral to processes of capitalist commodification.