Juliette Masquelier
Chercheuse Postdoctorale (BELSPO)
Juliette Masquelier is a historian of contemporary Catholicism, which she studies through the prism of gender issues. She is particularly interested in the history of women's and feminist movements, the history of the Catholic world and secularization, and the history of sexuality and reproduction. The question of commitment - confessional, social and/or political - is a common thread running through her research.
In 2019 she defended a PhD thesis at ULB on women's emancipation in Catholic organizations in Belgium, published in 2021 under the title Femmes catholiques en mouvements. Action catholique et émancipation féminine en Belgique francophone (1955-1990) (Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles). As part of a FNRS postdoctoral fellowship (2020-2023), she worked on women's voluntary work and studied the metamorphosis of maternity norms in the Catholic world after the Second World War, through the case of medical clinics for mothers and infants.
Since July 2023, she has been engaged as a postdoctoral researcher on the BRAIN WomenExile project (BELSPO) in collaboration with ULB, the University of Antwerp and the Belgian State Archives. She is studying the political involvement of exiled women in Belgium (1918-1958) and its representations in the archives of the Aliens Police.
Juliette Masquelier has also written, as lead author, the annual reports of the Observatoire des Religions et de la Laïcité (ORELA) in 2019 and 2020.