Jolien Gijbels

Jolien Gijbels is assistant professor of History at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and member of the SHOC research group. In 2021, she defended her PhD thesis on religion, medical ethics and difficult births in nineteenth-century Belgium at KU Leuven. Before joining the VUB, 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 interests include the history of medicine, technology and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current project focuses on the development of gynecological surgery and changing doctor-patient relationships around 1900. She has published on the history of obstetric dilemmas, reproductive surgery and the relationship between medicine and religion in, among other journals, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Religious History and Annales de Démographie Historique.

She 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).