As of the 1st of October, SSAB will welcome Nyala Nauwelaers as a new predoctoral fellow. Ms. Nauwelaers was awarded the VUB-ULB Seed Money Fellowship 2024-2025. For the project “Social Time and Desacralization. On the Changing Nature of Sundays in Belgium”, she will be investigating the transformation of social time in Belgium by looking at the long-term desacralization of Sunday through the shifting mobility, work and leisure opportunities on this given day throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st Century.
Ms. Nauwelaers pursued her bachelor’s (2019-2022) and master’s degree (2022-2023) in history at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. During these four years, she had the opportunity to study abroad twice as a part of the Erasmus exchange programme. She spent a semester at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the CY Paris Cergy Université where she expended her knowledge in contemporary history and got a taste of the different academic approaches in both countries.
After returning from Paris, Ms. Nauwelaers first got involved with SSAB as a research assistant. She contributed to retrieving the whereabouts of the disparate collections of Belgian freethinker periodicals up to 1940 in the various archival institutions around the country. During the same semester, she was an intern at the research centre of SSAB’s partner, Liberas. Both experiences sparked her interest in researching the secular experience.
Last academic year (2023-2024), Ms. Nauwelaers commenced a second Master’s in Gender and Diversity, an interuniversity degree at all Flemish Universities, to further specialise in women’s and gender history. For her internship, she returned to Liberas as a historical researcher and created an overview of the changing perspectives of the Flemish Liberals on gender quotas between 1980 and today.
In her Joint PhD research, she will therefore get the opportunity to shed light on the different experiences of men and women in terms of the desacralization of the Sunday practice.
Ms. Nauwelaers says to be very proud to have received the VUB-ULB Seed Money Fellowship and looks forward to continue to fuel her passion for history as a PhD student at both freethinking universities.
Outside of her academic endeavours, Ms. Nauwelaers loves travelling and highly values international experiences. She also loves to paint, and write poetry and can be found (trail)running around Brussels.