ENVIRHUS - Team

Tim Soens - coordinator/supervisor

Tim Soens is an expert in Landscape and Environmental history, with specific emphasis on - climate history (Little Ice Age to Anthropocene) - coastal and riverine landscapes - wetland management - urban waters - traditional agriculture - natural disasters, risks and their management - urban food provisioning and the role of urban agriculture and urban commons in urban food supplies - evolution of urban and rural landscapes (using historical GIS) - long-term evolutions of inequalities. 

To find out more about Tim and his research, click here.

Reinoud Vermoesen

Reinoud Vermoesen is an expert on rural consumption and the commercialisation of agriculture in the premodern Southern Netherlands, with an additional specialisation in (rural) second-hand markets, and the economy of the polder landscapes of the region Waasland. Furthermore, he also does research on the rural history of colonial New Netherland.  

To find out more about Reinoud and his research, click here.

Postdoctoral researchers & projects

Stef Espeel
  • Did plague cause grain crises? Unravelling the mechanisms linking epidemics and food supplies in the later Middle Ages. 
Wout Saelens
  • A great silence? the everyday politics of smoke in the age of coal: Ghent (1780-1880). 
Kathleen Pribyl
  • Food from Somewhere? Urban Households, Access to Land and Alternative Food Entitlements in the Late Medieval City. 

Doctoral researchers & projects

Lora Pannekoucke
  • Epidemics and Inequalities in Belgium from the Plague to COVID-19. What can we learn about societal resilience? (website: EPIBEL
Cécile Bruyet
  • Food from Somewhere? Urban Households, Access to Land and Alternative Food Entitlements in the Late Medieval City. 
Lena Walschap
  • Seas of Risk and Resilience: peasant fishing on the late medieval English coasts as a coping strategy against climate-induced hazards. 
Arnoud Jensen
  • Peasants into Stewards. Leasehold and Environmental Stewardship in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1400. 
Jean-Baptiste Ortlieb
  • ​Environmental history of the summits of the southern Vosges (13th - 18th century).
Sam Geens
  • A golden age for labour? Economic inequality and labour income after the Black Death: Flanders and Tuscany compared (1350-1500).
Ric Janssens
  • ​Questioning water modernity. A GIS-approach to the privatization and resilience of common drinking water systems in 16th- and 19thcentury cities, test-case: Antwerp.

Past research projects

Wout Vande Sompele
  • Tussen landbouw en de markt: de rurale middenstand in Doel, 1614-1900. (2021)
Stef Espeel
  • Prices and crises: The grain economy in fourteenth-century Flanders. (2021)
Rogier van Kooten
  • Antwerpen 1584 : oorlog en ongelijkheid in de stedelijke ruimte. (2021)
Frank Gelaude
  • De vroege hydrografie van de stad Gent, een geomorfologisch en historisch onderzoek van menselijke ingrepen in de waterhuishouding van het middeleeuwse Gent. (2018)
Jim van der Meulen
  • Woven into the urban fabric : rural cloth manufacture and economic development in the Flemish West-Quarter (1300-1600). (2017)
Pieter De Graef
  • Urbs in Rure? Urban manure and fertiliser improvementin 18th-century Flemish farming. (2016)
Filip Van Roosbroeck
  • To cure is to kill? Cattle plague, state intervention and veterinary knowledge in the Austrian Netherlands, 1769-1785. (2016)
Iason Jongepier
  • Exploratie van de mogelijkheden van digitale historische kaarten voor landschapsgeschiedenis: crowdsourcing project rond de historische kaartencollectie van de familie Arenberg. (2022)
  • Drowned but not deserted : interactions between social and ecological processes of estuarine landscapes after flooding : test-case : the Waasland polders on the left-bank of the river Scheldt (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). (2015)
Eline Van Onacker
  • Subordinatie of solidariteit? Armenzorg als instrument van dorpselites in de 16de-eeuwse Zuidelijke Nederlanden. (2018)
  • Leaders of the pack? Village elites and social structures in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Campine area. (2014)
Maïka De Keyzer
  • The common denominator. The survival of the commons in the late medieval Campine area. (2014)
Kristof Dombrecht​
  • Plattelandsgemeenschappen, lokale elites en ongelijkheid in het Vlaamse kustgebied (14de-16de eeuw): case-study: Dudzele ambacht. (2014)