Study of medieval homophobia wins Flemish PhD Cup
Flanders’ annual research communication prize goes to a UGent historian who explored gay persecution in Bruges and beyond
Collective memory
Roelens (pictured left), who studied at Ghent University, was particularly interested in Bruges, where he found persecution of gays to be unusually high during the period. One reason for this, he concluded, was the city’s decline as a trading power.
“The city experienced economic problems at the end of the 15th century, and a society in difficulty often needs to heap its sins on an external enemy.”
His research used a broad range of documents, from legal sources to literature, to chart the peaks and troughs of persecution in the region and to find out what the broader population thought of behaviour then condemned as sinful.
Homoerotic feelings and the different responses to them have a past that is still relevant to today’s minority groups
“The collective memory of the LGBT community usually does not extend beyond the past half-century,” Roelens said. “I want to make it clear that homoerotic feelings and the different responses to them have a much longer past – a past that is still relevant to today’s minority groups.”
The competition, now in its fourth year, challenges researchers who have recently completed a PhD to step out of the academic sphere and present their work to the general public. This involves boiling down a thesis typically running to 100,000 words, completed over four to six years, into a brief, accessible talk.
Second place this year went to Margot Bastin, a psychologist who studied at KU Leuven, for her research into young people with depression. Her work emphasised the importance of talking about their problems, but also signalled the danger of creating additional anxiety if discussions do not fully explore their particular issues.
Third place went to Leen Sevens, a computer linguist at KU Leuven, who developed an online translation system that converts pictograms into text, and vice versa. This helps people with a mental disabilities to communicate online.
Photo courtesy UGent
