Associated members

​Moisés Kopper is a Research Professor (TTZAPBOF) at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, where he directs the data lab “InfoCitizen,” an interdisciplinary Starting Grant that explores the emerging links between grassroots datafication and citizenship in and from the Global South. Kopper is Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. He is the author of Architectures of Hope, a political ethnography of how public housing transformed the lives of once-rising poor Brazilians. His research has been funded by grants from the European Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He previously held postdoctoral appointments at the Free University of Brussels, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and the University of São Paulo. He also served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Cologne. His interests include informal markets; class mobility; material hope; the politics of datafication, inequality, and expertise; statecraft and societal resilience; and Latin America and Brazil.

​Olivier Sterck is Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp and the University of Oxford. He is the lead economist of the Refugee Economies Programme (REP). His research builds bridges between development economics, health economics, and refugee studies. With colleagues from the Refugee Economies Programme, Olivier has been collecting and analysing data on more than 15,000 refugees and members of host populations in Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, exploring themes such as refugee economies, self-reliance, mobility, cross-border trade, and refguee mental health. In partnership with the World Food Programme, Olivier has been assessing the impact of various cash transfer models on the socio-economic outcomes of refugee households and refugee businesses in the Kakuma refugee camp and the Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya. He has also worked with the World Bank on various impact evaluations of cash-based assistance programmes in Africa. With colleagues from the World Bank, Olivier has also worked on the construction of distribution-sensitive measures of Welfare, Poverty, and Inequality. For a complete list of publications, see his personal website: https://oliviersterck.wordpress.com

​Sam Geens is a senior researcher and associate lecturer at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on living standards and wealth in the Late Middle Ages. He obtained his PhD degree in history from the University of Antwerp with a thesis titled “A Golden Age for labour? Income and wealth before and after the Black Death in the Southern Low Countries and the Republic of Florence (1275-1550).” Geens has published several articles and chapters on the impact of pandemics, wars, and famines on economic inequality. He has also edited a book on the interaction between urbanism and inequality. His most recent project aims to retrace the social position of single women in late medieval Flanders. Aside from research, he teaches a number of courses at the BA and MA level, including the interdisciplinary course “Poverty and Inequality.”

​Wout Saelens (°1993) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Urban History (CUH) of the University of Antwerp and the Social History of Capitalism (SHOC) research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His primary research interests are situated at the intersection of energy, consumerism, pollution, everyday life and inequality in the urban history of the Low Countries from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. After studying medieval history at the University of Ghent (2015), Saelens obtained his PhD at the University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2021 with a dissertation on the transition to fossil energy, viewed from a consumer perspective, in the early modern Low Countries. His current project, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), investigates the political ecology and environmental culture of coal and smoke pollution in the nineteenth-century, industrial city.

​Ruben Peeters is a postdoctoral researcher in economic and financial history at the university of Antwerp (Belgium), employed in the Social History of Finance project. He obtained a bachelor and master degree in History from the University of Antwerp and a PhD in Economic history from the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) with a dissertation on the political economy of small firm financing in the Netherlands between 1900 and 1980. His research interests lie in credit markets, banking and inequality in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Current projects include investigations into notarial credit markets in nineteenth century Antwerp (National Bank of Belgium Grant), migrants’ use of credit, and the empirical history of financial crises. His work has been published in the Economic History Review and Enterprise & Society. He teaches courses on economic history and supervises theses.

​Stef Espeel (Bruges, 1992°) graduated in 2016 with an M.A. in history from the University of Ghent and obtained his PhD in history in 2021 at the University of Antwerp with a thesis on the grain economy of late medieval Flanders in which he studied the grain price evolution and the influence of large landlords on the grain economy in the fourteenth century. In 2022, his dissertation was awarded the prize Pro Civitate by the Académie Royale de Belgique and is

being published in several articles as well as an upcoming monograph. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the State Archives of Belgium, studying the reaction of urban governments and large ecclesiastical landlords in the cities of Mons, Namur and Liège to the food crises of the fifteenth century. In October 2023 he started his Junior Postdoctoral Grant (FWO) at the Centre for Urban History on the short-term economic disruptions of epidemics in the late Middle Ages and the possibility of a learning effect over time for mitigating societal vulnerability.

With a background in economics, social science and sustainability engineering, Josefine Vanhille's research interest goes to the role of social inequality and social protection in the climate issue, the distributional dimension of environmental policy, and the design and finance of just transition policy. As a post-doc researcher, she is affiliated to the Centre for Social Policy and the Institute for Environment and Sustainable Development, both at Antwerp University. She has worked with various public administrations (at local, Flemish, Belgian and European level) on concrete policy questions at the intersection of environmental policy and social justice, resulting in policy reports, journal articles, and handbook chapters.

​Michael Förster is a senior researcher and policy analyst in the fields of economic inequality and social policy. He has lead OECD work in this area for 10+ years, resulting in a series of flagship publications: "Divided We Stand - Why Inequality Keeps Rising" (2011), "In It Together- Why Less Inequality Benefits All" (2015), A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility" (2018), "Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class (2019), "Does Inequality Matter? How people perceive economic disparities and social mobility" (2021). Since September 2022 Michael is giving lectures on "inequality and policy" as a guest professor at the University of Antwerp. Since September 2023, he is also teaching at SciencesPo Paris.

​Richard Toppo is a postdoc researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His current research focuses on, broadly speaking, state-society relations and indigeneity in the Indian context. More specifically, he is looking into the many ways in which the state and mining companies reproduce their versions of legitimacy amongst (or get challenged by) indigenous communities in metallic mining sites; these relations are further compounded by intersections from Maoists (armed insurgents) and anti-mining indigenous activists. He recently completed his PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague. His doctoral study was an ethnographic insight into the indigenous collectives in the eastern state of India, who pursued multiple strategies to negotiate their rights and demands with the state and other dominant communities. He affiliates himself to the fields of development studies, socio-cultural anthropology, indigenous studies and conflict studies. A key aspect of his overall academic endeavor lies in addressing the question of inequality, in examining the role of 'equals' in further re-producing 'inequality'.

​Bossissi Nkuba is a professor at the University of Antwerp, Africa Museum and U.C.Bukavu. Starting from his PhD, he analysed the impacts of artisanal gold mining on aquatic life, human health, and DRC’s governance of mercury. He then led the development of DRC’s National Action Plan (NAP) for mercury reduction, and helped Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Zimbabwe prepare their NAPs’ implementation. His recent work includes the effects of cobalt mining on water access, quality, and governance; mining construction materials; fish farming in mines; urban food safety; etc. For reaching out to the general public, he directed the BFI award-winning documentary “Cobalt rush” portraying struggles and hopes of cobalt miners; wrote the comic novel “Gold fever” portraying women discrimination and health risks in gold mines; organised the exhibition “Mining Dreams”; and made science communications on Al-Jazeera, Reuters, the RedLine Podcast, and Radio Okapi.

​Zach Parolin's research focuses on the measurement, causes, and consequences of poverty and social inequality across the United States and European Union. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Policy at Bocconi University in Milan, and a Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy. At Bocconi, he directs the ExpPov Poverty and Inequality Research Lab, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. His work has appeared in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, American Sociological Review, AEA: Papers & Proceedings, Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, Demography, and elsewhere. Moreover, his research has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, CNN, in a U.S. presidential debate, and in other outlets.