Kaat WILS (University of Leuven) : Conclusions and general discussion
Kaat Wils studied history and philosophy at the universities of Louvain-la-Neuve and Leuven and Brown University. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with Positivism and intellectual culture in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1845-1914 (Amsterdam University Press, 2005). Since 2011, she is head of the Cultural History since 1750 Research Unit at the University of Leuven. She is a member of the KU Leuven Research Council and editor-in-chief of BMGN-Low Countries Historical Journal. Her research deals with the modern history of the humanities and the biomedical sciences, gender history, the history of education and the teaching and learning of history. She (co)edited books on the history of the gendered body (2001), on the medicalization of 19th century society (2002), on degeneration theory in Belgium (2003), on modern cultures of asceticism (2011) and on the human body in scientific and artistic representations (2017). She co-directed a five-volume secondary school history textbook, Passages (2009-2012) and special issues of Paedagogica Historica (2012) and the Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society (2012). She is co-editor, with Joris Vandendriessche and Evert Peeters of Scientists’ Expertise as Performance: Between State and Society, 1860-1960 (Pickering & Chatto, 2015) and contributed to War in Times of Peace, a monograph on the memory of the First World War in interwar education in Belgium (Pelckmans, 2015). She is currently supervising the projects ‘Anatomy, scientific authority and the visualized body in medicine and culture (Belgium, 1780-1930)’ and 'Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters in Twentieth Century Europe'.
