We are delighted to announce Eline Mestdagh as a co-chair of the Memory and Activism Working Group!

Eline Mestdagh is a historian and works as a FWO doctoral researcher at the Department of History at Ghent University. Among her interests are the recent manifestations of memory activism in the Netherlands and in Belgium related to slavery and the colonial past, respectively. In her PhD research she investigates the function of historical cultures and their underlying assumptions about time, past and historiography in the Belgian postcolonial debate. Adopting a methodology consisting primarily of ethnographic fieldwork and oral history, she is specifically interested in how ideas about the ‘proper’ way to deal with the past gain prominence in the interaction between memory activists and Belgian political and cultural institutions. Since 2018, she is one of the coördinators of the Ghent-based interdisciplinary research forum TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt. She is also a member of the International Network for the Theory of History (INTH).

If you are interesting in getting involved with the working group, please email Eline, Alexander Ulrich Thygesen or Clara Vlessing.