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Lien Verpoest

Associate Professor of Modern History at KU Leuven

About me

Lien Verpoest is Associate Professor at the research group Modernity and Society 1800-2000 at the History Department of the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts. She is a member of the Steering Committee of Metaforum, the interdisciplinary think tank of KU Leuven, senior member of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, and board member of the Leuven Institute of Advanced Studies (LIAS) and the Dutch-Belgian Working Group on Eighteenth Century Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of history, area studies and comparative politics. Within this context she works from a contemporary as well as an historical perspective. This translates itself in a research focus on diplomatic history and East-West relations, and the development of relations between various regional and subregional networks and organisations on the Eurasian continent. These research subjects are studied from the perspective of new diplomatic history, strategic narratives, and historic institutionalism. Lien Verpoest mainly publishes in the field of diplomatic history, with a focus on East-West relations and "unacknowledged diplomats". She is currently working on a biography of Marie-Caroline Murray, La Muse Belgique, who took on such an unacknowledged role in Brussels (1770-1798) and Vienna (1798-1830).

Since 2018 Lien Verpoest is a co-promotor of the C1-project CONNECTIVITY (2018-2024), which assesses the contestation of international norms and their impact on international relations. Sinds 2021, she is PI of a CELSA project on heritage diplomacy, titled Contested Heritage: the securitization of heritage in Eastern Europe and its challenges for EU and UN actorness, with the University of Tartu and the University of Prague as co-promotors.