Jolien Gijbels joins SHOC as an assistant professor of History. At VUB, she teaches courses on contemporary history, the history of gender, globalization and historiography.
In 2021, Jolien defended her PhD thesis on medical ethics and difficult births in nineteenth-century Belgium at KU Leuven. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven and a Fulbright and BAEF fellow at the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. In 2024, she stayed as a Junior Fellow of the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University.
Jolien’s research is situated in the field of the history of medicine and science, with particular attention to gender, health inequities and reproductive medicine. She currently focuses on the development of gynecological surgery and doctor-patient relationships in the twentieth century. She has published her research in leading journals such as the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Religious History and Annales de Démographie Historique. Her PhD dissertation was awarded the DHST Dissertation Prize (2023) and Jan Gillis prize (2022).
Jolien is a book editor of Wonderkamer, a magazine of the history of science, vice president of Gewina, the Belgian-Dutch Society for History of Science and Universities, and board member of the (Belgian-Dutch) Society for Gender History (VVG).