In February 2025, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt joined LUCK and for six months she will be part of Johan Östling’s project on the Europeanisation of the universities in the 1980s and 1990s. She describe herself in this way:

I am a cultural historian and sociologist from Belgium, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK).

My academic background lies in the history and sociology of science and knowledge. I hold a PhD in History from Ghent University (2024) and an MA in the Social Sciences from The University of Chicago (2018), where I was a Fulbright Grantee and Belgian American Educational Foundation Baillet Latour Fellow. In general, my work addresses how big twentieth-century trends have affected the production of knowledge, and historical knowledge in specific. I have looked at the way in which digitization, the rise of populism, European integration, neoliberalization, and the introduction of computers affected humanities scholars and historians, thereby touching on their roles as experts, as professionals, and as peers.

In June 2024, I defended a dissertation titled The Price of History about the history of research funding and its effects on the historical discipline since 1970. In October 2024, I started a new research project on the history of peer review in the humanities (with Sjang ten Hagen at Utrecht University), which touches on issues of academic inequality, (hyper)competition, and quantitative performance assessment. This project is temporarily on hold as I join the team of Johan Östling at Lund University between February and July 2025, to study how Europeanisation processes impacted universities between 1985-2010. Together with Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, and Walderez Ramalho, I also research the use of history by populist parties and movements and the relationship between (democratic) states and history.

My recent publications include a co-edited book on populism and history with Cambridge University Press (2024), as well as several papers on the history of EU funding, the history of peer review, and twentieth-century historiography. For more info, click here.