Centre for Urban History - CSG - University of Antwerp

28/09/2026

Welcome Felix Schlichter! ✨

Felix Schlichter has joined the Centre for Urban History - CSG - University of Antwerp as an Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen (FWO) Postdoc working on a project entitled: "History between Faith and Fact: Early Modern Ecclesiastical Historiography and the Rise of Critical Research (c. 1640-1730)” under the mentorship of Theodor Dunkelgrün. Felix is a historian of early modern intellectual history who obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge and has since held research fellowships at various institutions in Germany and Italy. He has published on early modern mythography, biblical criticism, antiquarianism, and chronology.

His project stems from a simple premise: that we can learn much about those research practices that today’s historians share by thinking more about how, when, and why they first developed. His research focusses specifically on historical scholarship in the late seventeenth-century. By analysing the scholarship and scholarly community of the historian Enrico Noris (1631-1704), his research traces how traditions of antiquarian and ecclesiastical scholarship came together to promote a new approach to the research, certainty, and value of historical knowledge, practices which still inform some of the basic tenets of historical research today.

🖼️: Enrico Noris being serenaded by angels, detail from the frontispiece of his Opera Omnia.

25/09/2026

UAntwerpen schrijft geschiedenis | Publiekslezing

Hoe wordt het slavernijverleden in Congo herinnerd?

Op 6 oktober geeft Margot Luyckfasseel, Junior Onderzoeksprofessor Moderne Afrikaanse Geschiedenis, een publiekslezing over de beeldvorming rond slavernij in en rond Kisangani.

Leopold II presenteerde zijn koloniale project in Congo als een onderneming tegen slavernij. Maar hoe werd slavernij in de regio zelf ervaren en herinnerd? Aan de hand van mondelinge geschiedenis en archiefbronnen onderzoekt Luyckfasseel hoe koloniale en trans-Atlantische beeldvorming het geheugen over dit verleden mee vormgeven.

📅 6 oktober 2026 | 19:00–20:30
📍 Stadscampus UAntwerpen, gebouw R - R.007
📌 Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerpen
Gratis. Inschrijven kan hier: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=-wgueVQtjkqvciAlSBNu9heEOXMfmKdLnwPApR2o6sNUNk9ZTk5GVU9UVkMxUlpNMVJOVEdMMUVDVy4u&route=shorturl

04/09/2026

✨ EAUH 2026 | Session Highlight

What happens when finance meets chance?

Jeroen Puttevils' paper focuses on Antwerp in the 1550s and 1560s where several large scale lottery proposals were launched and where interesting connections were made between central government officials and lottery projectors.

Jeroen Puttevils
Experimenting with Chance: Lottery Finance in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp

📍 Session 8 – Capitals of Capital: Credit Networks and Financial Markets in Europe (13th–18th Centuries)
📅 Friday 4 September 2026 | 08:30–10:45
🖼️ Anthonis Mor, Margaret of Parma, governor of the Netherlands, c. 1559, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

More information on the EAUH 2026 Conference can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

04/09/2026

🌆 EAUH 2026 Conference: day 3

On the third day of the EAUH 2026 Conference, researchers from the UAntwerp CUH - Centre for Urban History will present research spanning sixteenth-century Antwerp to twentieth-century Kinshasa.
Presentations

Session 8 – Capitals of Capital: Credit Networks and Financial Markets in Europe
Jeroen Puttevils: Experimenting with Chance: Lottery Finance in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp.

Session 42 – Urbanities of Belonging: Emigrés from East Central Europe in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Cities
Hilde Greefs and Anne Winter: Between pogroms, diamonds and networks. Jewish newcomers from Russian Poland and Galicia in Antwerp in the early 1900s.

Session 76 – The urban history of socio-ecological trade-offs
Wout Saelens and Martijn Collijs: Rifts and Shifts in the Industrial City: Coal Smoke and Environmental Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Ghent.

Session 84 – Spatializing Popular Music: urban networks of creativity in Europe and Beyond
Margot Luyckfasseel: Rethinking Kinshasa’s networks of creativity: “Tradition”, class, and space in Congolese popular music.

Session chairs
André Klaassen, Magnus Linnarsson and Greet De Block will chair Session 56: Infrastruggles and citizenship: Urban public services, 1840–1940.

Koenraad Danneels and Wout Saelens will chair Session 76: The urban history of socio-ecological trade-offs.

Simon Gunn, Stijn Oosterlynck and Ilja Van Damme will chair Session 84: Spatializing Popular Music: urban networks of creativity in Europe and Beyond.

More information on the sessions, including times and locations, can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

Discounts and useful suggestions available in the accommodation section EAUH 2026 Conference City Networks in Europe and Beyond Barcelona, September 2-5, 2026 SESSIONS OVERVIEW SESSIONS WITH PAPERS SESSIONS TIMETABLE WORKSHOPS AND VISITS GENERAL PROGRAMME CONFERENCE REGISTRATION RESERVATION: Plenary...

03/09/2026

✨ EAUH 2026 | Session Highlight

What happens when a railway transforms a neighbourhood?

The railway neighbourhood is historically marked by stark inequalities between rich and poor, migrant and local, and sedentary and mobile. But how did these inequalities take shape as the infrastructure established itself? This paper analyses population and mobility for Antwerp's (and a little bit Marseille's) railway station during its earliest decades.

Jasper Segerink
A Janus-faced street? A ‘microscapical’ lens on the demography of Antwerp’s (and Marseilles?) railway station boulevards (late 19th–early 20th centuries).

📍 Session 49 – Railways and the Consolidation of the Urban Network in Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
📅 Thursday 3 September 2026 | 14:00–15:30

More information on the EAUH 2026 Conference can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

03/09/2026

✨ EAUH 2026 | Session Highlight

Was the art and antiques trade really an ‘old boys’ network’?

For decades, the art and antiques trade has been imagined as a world of male connoisseurs, dealers and collectors. But what happens when we follow the correspondence of Marie Van Herck, an Antwerp antiques dealer who ran her own business and maintained an international network of clients and suppliers (1910-1914)?

Rick Faust
Old Boys Network? Female Agency in the International Antiques Trade through Antwerp-based Antiques Dealer Marie Van Herck, 1910–1914

📍 Session 40 – Gateways to Work in Urban Spaces: Women’s Strategies, Networks, Institutions, and Mobilities (18th–20th Century)
📅 Thursday 3 September 2026 | 14:00–15:30
🖼️ Unknown photographer, World Exhibition of 1894: shop with female art and antiques dealer, FelixArchief – City Archives Antwerp, inv. no. 934 #15308.

More information on the EAUH 2026 Conference can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

03/09/2026

✨ EAUH 2026 | Session highlight

What does it take to feed a city?

Does ‘Feeding cities’ have to mean food markets? Not always! In her presentation based on her recently defended PhD-thesis, Bruyet Cécile will talk about self-sufficiency, short food chains and inequalities in late medieval Antwerp.

Cécile Bruyet
On their plate? Urban households and their access to food via property rights to land (Antwerp, 15th–16th century)

📍 Session 29 – Feeding European Cities: Governance, Gender and Sustainability, from 15th century to present
📅 Thursday 3 September 2026 | 08:30–10:45
🖼️ View of Antwerp, Jan Wildens, 1635/1636, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain.

More information on the EAUH 2026 Conference can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

03/09/2026

🔎 EAUH 2026 Conference: day 2

Thursday brings a packed programme of urban history research, with members of the UAntwerp CUH - Centre for Urban History presenting research on topics such as consumption, food, gender, migration, inequality, tourism, trade, and the urban experience.

Presentations
Session 9 – Urban consumption and urban networks
Peter Stabel: Changes in Trade and Consumption: Urban Industries in Flanders and their Mediterranean Markets.

Session 29 – Feeding European Cities
Bruyet Cécile: On their plate? Urban households and their access to food via property rights to land (Antwerp, fifteenth–sixteenth century).

Session 40 – Gateways to Work in Urban Spaces: Women's Strategies, Networks, Institutions, and Mobilities
Lea Leboissetier: Gilding the Gutter. The lived experience of female street traders in growing British cities (1860–1950).

Rick Faust: Old Boys Network? Female Agency in the International Antiques Trade through Antwerp-based Antiques Dealer Marie Van Herck, 1910–1914.

Session 45 – Tracing urban inequalities in the past through census data and statistical sources
Joeri Aerts, Hilde Greefs and Paul Puschmann: Mortality inequalities between natives and migrants: Cause-specific mortality differences in the port city of Antwerp from a long-term perspective (1840–1920).

Session 49 – Railways and the consolidation of the urban network in Europe
Jasper Segerink: A Janus-faced street? Reconstructing the demographic geography in the ‘microscapes’ of Antwerp’s and Marseille’s railway station boulevards.

Session 63 – Changing emotions in changing cities
Ilja Van Damme: The Sound of Nineteenth-century Antwerp – towards an exploration of sonic territories in a modernizing city.

Lea Leboissetier: ‘No one was afraid of a young girl selling onions!’ How emotions shaped itinerant trading interaction in urban Britain (1850–1950).

Session 64 – How did cities entertain their guests?
Evert Lambrechts: Worth the gamble? Tourism and the embeddedness of gambling in seaside resorts: the case of Ostend at the Belgian coast (1878–1930).

Session chairs
Anneleen Arnout and Lea Leboissetier will chair Session 63: Changing emotions in changing cities.

More information on the sessions, including times and locations, can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

Discounts and useful suggestions available in the accommodation section EAUH 2026 Conference City Networks in Europe and Beyond Barcelona, September 2-5, 2026 SESSIONS OVERVIEW SESSIONS WITH PAPERS SESSIONS TIMETABLE WORKSHOPS AND VISITS GENERAL PROGRAMME CONFERENCE REGISTRATION RESERVATION: Plenary...

02/09/2026

✨ EAUH 2026 | Session Highlight

What if the city was never really an ‘island’?

Much urban history on lodging, and migration generally, treats the city as an isolated ‘island’, whereas its mobility flows precisely demonstrate an embedding in regional and transnational networks. This paper aims to study such networks by shedding light on the accommodation sector for an entire province, namely the Bouches-du-Rhône Department in late nineteenth-century France.

Jasper Segerink & Céline Regnard
Lodging beyond the ‘urban island’? Tracing the rural-urban network of the accommodation sector in the Bouches-du-Rhône Department in 1874.

📍 Session 39 – Lodging Practices and Networks of Work, Migration, and Sociability: Long-term Perspectives across European Cities and Beyond (1500–present)
📅 Wednesday 2 September 2026 | 15:35–17:35

More information on the EAUH 2026 Conference can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/

02/09/2026

✨ EAUH 2026 | Session Highlight

Did the furniture in devotional paintings reflect real life?

What was the role of furniture in domestic prayer in the 15th and 16th century Low Countries? By comparing religious paintings with probate inventories from Antwerp and Bruges, Jessica van Zadelhof and Lien Vandenberghe examine whether depicted seating furniture merely advocated an ideal of domestic devotion or reflected actual devotional practices.

Jessica van Zadelhof & Lien Vandenberghe
From Lecterns to 'schabellekens'. The Use of Seating Furniture for Devotion in the 15th and 16th century Southern Low Countries.

📍 Session 19 – Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Domestic Cultures in Premodern Cities in Europe and Beyond, 13th–17th Centuries
📅 Wednesday 2 September 2026 | 13:45–15:15
🖼️ Joos van Cleve, The Annunciation, ca. 1525, oil on panel, 86.4 × 80 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

More information on the EAUH 2026 Conference can be found here: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/