PD Dr. Eveline G. Bouwers
Research associate
Room: 03-10, Diether-von-Isenburg-Str. 9-11, 55116 Mainz
Phone: +49 6131 39 39345
E-Mail
Personal Details:
* Hilversum (The Netherlands). Eveline Bouwers studied History, Art History and Political Science at Utrecht, Leuven and Amsterdam (2000–2005). In 2009, she obtained a doctorate from the European University Institute in Florence with a comparative analysis of remembrance cultures in Europe between 1790 and 1840. This was followed by a postdoctoral research fellowship at Bielefeld University (2009-2012) as well as a stints as visiting scholar at the universities of York (2007) and Harvard (2011) and affiliated scholar at KADOC Leuven (since 2013). Since 2013, Eveline Bouwers has been senior fellow at IEG as well as lecturer at Bielefeld University and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. From 2013 to 2019 she was moreover head of the Emmy Noether Research Group "Battles over Belief: Religion and Violence in Catholic Europe, 1848-1914", financed by the German Research Council. She was included in AcademiaNet in 2015. In January 2025, she was habilitated at Universität Bielefeld.
Research Interests:
Modern European History
Comparative and transnational history
Cultural and social history (especially memory studies, visual history, history of violence and protest, religious history)
Selected Publications:
(ed.), Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World (London: Routledge, 2023).
(ed. mit David Nash), Demystifying the Sacred. Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022). Open Access
(ed.), Glaubenskämpfe: Katholiken und Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019). Open Access
Das Nationaldenkmal als Projektionsfläche: Eine großdeutsche Geschichtsidee von der Romantik bis zur Wiedervereinigung, Historische Zeitschrift 304:2 (2017). 332-369.
Public Pantheons in Revolutionary Europe. Comparing Cultures of Remembrance, c. 1790-1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Research projects:
The Emmy Noether research group undertakes the first systematic analysis of the use of protest and violence in conflicts pertaining to religious culture and Church power in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Europe. It studies the motives and legitimation strategies for the use of crowd action and simultaneously probes opportunities to overcome physical conflict and the development of alternative ways to overcome conflict.
Blasphemy, heresy and freedom of expression: on the limits of the sayable and the visible in modern Europe. The project led by Eveline G. Bouwers as part of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group "Faith Struggles: Religion and Violence in Catholic Europe (1848-1914)" focuses on the history of blasphemy in Europe since 1500.
The idea of the violent Catholic: a liberal fantasy or a historical reality after all? Using micro-historically processed case studies from Belgium, Germany and France, the project examines how Catholic believers, who were largely excluded from political decision-making processes, dealt with conflicts over the boundaries of religious-ecclesiastical space in their everyday lives.
