About us

• To collect, secure and evaluate sources on regional history
• To ask new questions on history
• To present and interpret the history of East Belgium,
• To coordinate historical work in East Belgium,
• To support hobby historians and those interested in history, history societies and researchers, and to contribute to historical awareness in East Belgium.

The historical work is intended to contribute to citizens‘ better understanding of living together in the past and thus to develop orientation for the complex questions of the present and the future.

In the founding act of the centre, these goals are described in Article 3:

‘The purpose of the association is to promote historical research in the German-speaking Community of Belgium. This includes all measures that support safeguarding of sources of all kinds, processing, presentation or publication (written, audio-visual, digital or any other form), the communication of historical research, the coordination of historical work in the German-speaking Community between all directly and indirectly concerned stakeholders, as well as regional, supra-regional and international cooperation with other historical and scientific institutions.” (cf. appendix of the Moniteur belge of 4 December 2014).

Committees of the Centre for East Belgian History

Board of Directors

The Board of Directors oversees the day-to-day operations of the Centre. Its members are:

Dr Alain Brose (treasurer)

Dr Jens Giesdorf (secretary)

Els Herrebout (president)

Gary Jost (member)

Catherine Weisshaupt (member)

Christoph Brüll and Nicholas Williams are also ex-officio members of the Board of Directors.

Advisory Board

The Advisory Board is the think tank of the Centre. It drafts concepts, accompanies and networks with the Greater Region. It has existed in its current composition since January 2020.

Prof Dr Christoph Brüll

Els Herrebout

Prof Dr Catherine Lanneau

Prof Dr Sabine Schmitz

Prof Dr Hubert Roland

Prof Dr Marnix Beyen

Prof Dr Denis Scuto

Stefan Wunsch

Short bios of the people at the Centre for East Belgian History

Dr Philippe Beck is a research associate at the ZOG, at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg and at UCLouvain. After studying modern languages and Philosophy at UCLouvain, he worked as an English teacher. He then undertook his doctorate at UCLouvain on the writers Peter Schmitz and Josef Ponten, who come from what is now East Belgium. From 2010 until 2021 he was a lecturer there and has published numerous articles on the history and literature of East Belgium. As a postdoctoral researcher at the C²DH), he was one of the curators of the virtual exhibition ‘Timestrata. Prospecting an In-Between’ (2020). He has been working part-time for ZOG since 1 June 2021. To his website

Dr Alain Brose (Board of Directors) studied at the Universities of Namur, Brussels and Bonn, specialising in Medieval and Contemporary History. After working as an employee at the museum Maison de la Métallurgie et de l’Industrie in Liège, he has been a history teacher at the César Franck Athenaeum in Kelmis since 2010. He has written numerous articles for the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, for the Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences and for the local history magazine Im Göhltal, as well as educational dossiers for the non-profit organisation La Besace as part of the Mémoire des Images project. Alain Brose is a member of numerous historical associations in the region, including Im Göhltal, Association 1871 and Humanitas: Association for the promotion of brotherhood, tolerance and international understanding.

Prof Dr Marnix Beyen (Advisory Board) is Professor of History at the University of Antwerp. He specialises in the cultural, social and political history of Belgium, the Netherlands and France in the 19th and 20th centuries. He publishes numerous articles in the daily press. To his website

Prof Dr Christoph Brüll (Advisory Board, Board of Directors), Chair of the Advisory Board, is an ex officio member of the Board of Directors. He was a researcher with the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) at the University of Liège from 2009 to 2017. Since September 2017, he has been working as Assistant Professor at the University of Luxembourg. His publications focus on German-Belgian relations, transnational political and social history in Western Europe and the history of historiography. To his website

Dr Tobias Dewes is Deputy Director of the ZOG. He studied at James Cook University in Townsville and Saarland University in Saarbrücken, specialising in economic and social history as well as the history of technology and the environment. He then completed a doctorate in economics at RWTH Aachen University on knowledge management, investigating organisational and transfer structures in the tertiary sector of the education system.

Dr Jens Giesdorf (Board of Directors), is an educational officer for school media libraries and media education at the Ministry of the German-speaking Community. Jens Giesdorf studied History, Political Science and German Studies at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his doctorate in Magdeburg on the topic ‘National-religious Jewish Settler Fundamentalism in Israel/Palestine’. Since April 2016, he has been President of the History and Museum Association Zwischen Venn und Schneifel in Sankt Vith.

Els Herrebout (Board of Directors, Advisory Board), historian and archivist, is President of ZOG and member of the Advisory Board. She studied at the Universities of Leuven and Antwerp. She is senior state archivist at the Eupen State Archives. She has published numerous inventories, archival studies and contributions on the history of East Belgium. Els Herrebout brings the expertise of the archive to the centre and thus also strengthens the role of the State Archives in the historical landscape of East Belgium.

Gary Jost (Board of Directors) is a secondary school teacher at the Bischofliche Schule Technisches Institut in Sankt Vith, as well as director of the private museum Landwirtschaftsmuseum Mirfelderbusch and vice-president of the history and museum association Zwischen Venn und Schneifel. After studying history and classical archaeology at the University of Trier, he turned his attention to history education, particularly as the initiator of numerous events at the Mirfelderbusch Agricultural Museum, which brings the rich history of Eifel agriculture to life in experimental archaeological activity days. In addition to the agricultural history of the Eifel, his research focuses on regional history, particularly the French and early Prussian periods.

Prof Dr Catherine Lanneau (Advisory Board) is Chair of Belgian History and International Relations at the University of Liège. Her main research interests are the history of Belgian-French relations and the history of the Walloon Movement. To her website

Prof Dr Hubert Roland (Advisory Board) is a Research Fellow at the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique and Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL). His main interests are the history of Franco-German cultural and literary transfer, comparative imagology, magic realism in German and European literature and comparative historiography of the avant-garde. To his website

Prof Dr Sabine Schmitz (Advisory Board) is head of the Belgium Centre at the University of Paderborn and professor of Romance literature and cultural studies. Her main research interests are the literary history of Belgium, France, and Spain, as well as the history of Belgium. To her website

Prof Dr Denis Scuto (Scientific Advisor) is Professor of Luxembourgish History at the University of Luxembourg and Vice-Director of the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg. He specialises in 20th century Luxembourgish history and migration history. To his website

Catherine Weisshaupt (Board of Directors) has been director of the Eupen City Museum since 2018, with a thematic focus on the textile industry in the 18th and 19th centuries. After studying art history and archaeology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, she worked as a freelance researcher on the history of East Belgian architecture. As part of her voluntary work for the Eupen History and Museum Association, she focused on communicating the local cultural heritage.

Dr Nicholas Williams is a historian and has been director of ZOG since May 2021. After studying in Heidelberg and Aberystwyth, he completed a PhD in Saarbrücken, Cambridge and Paris on the evacuation of the Franco-German border area in 1939, which led the Anglo- to discover his interest in the history of border spaces. After completing a post-doctoral project at the Institute for European History in Mainz on the support of Nazi perpetrators by the Protestant Church after 1945, Nicholas Williams came to ZOG full-time. Here he is dedicated to East Belgian history and border spaces in a European context and is responsible for the business operations of the ZOG.

Stefan Wunsch (Advisory Board) is the scientific director of the documentation centre of the former Nazi Ordensburg Vogelsang in the Eifel National Park (Vogelsang-IP). There, he works in particular in the fields of adult education and history education. To his website