Charlotte Van Riet joins the SHOC research group as a PhD researcher in November 2024. Awarded an FWO-fellowship, she will work on the medieval urbanisation in the Low Countries.
Charlotte obtained an MA in History & Archaeology (2021) and an MA in History (2023) at VUB, and formerly worked within the SHOC research group as a student researcher in the Talent voor Onderzoek (TvO) Honours program. In 2023, she successfully completed her MA thesis on the development of the Sint-Niklaas parish in Late-Medieval Ypres, adopting an interdisciplinary approach. She will further develop this in her doctoral research.
Supervised by Bart Lambert (VUB, History), Christophe Snoeck (VUB, Bio-archaeology) & Bram Vannieuwenhuyze (UvA, Cartography), Charlotte will research the earliest city-dwellers in medieval Ypres. Specifically, she will try to find out what these people’s socio-economic background was and where they originated from. This will help understand how and why they created the first urban environments and how they experienced living within them. In order to answer these questions, isotopic research on the skeletal remains of Ypres’ medieval inhabitants will be integrated with information from historical sources and cartographic evidence.