Arne Vinck (°1994) is joining SHOC as a Talent-for-Research student. He obtained his Bachelor in Education (Secondary Education Dutch and History) at Arteveldehogeschool Gent in 2017. His bachelor’s thesis focused on social mobility and travel behaviour after the construction and improvement of paved roads during the Austrian Habsburg period. As part of this project, he developed an educational board game to make the topic accessible in the classroom.
After completing a bridging programme in History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, he is now set to complete his master’s year as a Talent-for-Research student. During this period, he will continue working as a secondary school teacher.
Arne is particularly interested in the legal and institutional history of the early modern Low Countries. As an intern, he contributed to the PARDONS project at the State Archives of Belgium. There, he developed skills in using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models to transcribe and index early modern pardon letters.
In his master’s thesis, Arne is studying the work ethics of lower court personnel in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Duchy of Brabant. He focuses on the actions of clerks, secretaries, notaries, registrars and so-called procureurs who represented the litigants in court. His research examines how these officials applied — and sometimes abused — legal frameworks in their work and in their contact with people seeking for justice. The project is supervised by Professor Klaas Van Gelder.