Brent Huygh (°2001) joins SHOC as a PhD student on the doctoral project “Village(r)s in Court: Judicial Empowering Interactions between Subjects and Government in Rural Brabant and Limburg (17th and 18th century)”, supervised by Prof. Dr. Klaas Van Gelder.
Brent started his academic studies in Political Sciences, obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in 2022. Afterwards, he finished a preparatory program in History at VUB, obtaining his Master’s degree, summa cum laude, in 2024. In his master’s thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Wouter Ryckbosch, he studied the commercial development of the access roads in the city of Brussels during the eighteenth century using statistical methods.
2023-2024, he also completed an internship in the State Archives of Belgium. Brent attempted to introduce the diverse and captivating corpus of documents from the Council of Brabant to a wider audience using Instagram videos (@raadvanbrabant). During this internship he was thus able to make himself familiar with the contents of this extraordinary judicial archive.
His doctoral research project will focus on a specific series within the archives of the Council of Brabant: the “processen van gemeenten”, in which rural communities attempted to address abuses of power, corruption, taxation issues, fraud and disputes involving privileges. By analysing this series, he hopes to enrich our current knowledge about the political and juridical landscape in the Southern Netherlands during the early modern era, more specifically about the often understudied rural context of this region.