Violet Soen is an Early Modern Historian, investigating aristocratic networks in the borderlands between France and the Netherlands. Previously, she has researched the Dutch Revolt and the sixteenth-century inquisition in the Low Countries.
 



After studying history in Leuven and Bielefeld, she also obtained a masters degree in European Studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain. She  gained her PhD in Early Modern History at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2008. She was Max Weber Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy in 2008-2009. At present, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, supported by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO Vlaanderen). In 2010-2011 she will be a visiting fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
 
Her research interests include early modern religion and state formation, especially in the Low Countries and the Spanish Empire. She is the author of a book on the sixteenth-century inquisition in the Low Countries, for which she received an award in religious history from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in 2004. Her dissertation on resistance and reconciliation during the Dutch Revolt (1564-1598) argues that peacemaking - also in the religious sphere - was an integral part of Habsburg politics. Currently, she is researching the strategies of noble familes at the border between the Burgundian-Habsburg composite state and the French monarchy from 1477 to 1632, especially during the Wars of Religion.

 
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