Nel de Mûelenaere is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the Interdisciplinary Historical Food Studies research group of de Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on the relation between humanitarian aid, food and gender during and after the First World War. One strand of her work examines the experiences and impact of (female) American relief workers in Belgium and France. Another looks at living standards of Belgian families during and after the war. She teaches methodological courses and a course on the history of warfare that is part of the EUTOPIA leaning community ‘Urban Catastrophes: Vulnerability, Disasters, and Urban Resilience since the 19th Century’. Prof. de Mûelenaere is the vice-chair of the research committee for the Faculty of Languages and the Humanities. She is Honorary Fellow of the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies (BrIAS), of which she was co-director and program director in 2020-2022. She held the Peter Paul Rubens Chair at UC Berkeley in 2022, and was the BAEF Cabeaux-Jacobs postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in 2019. There, her research on the Belgian relief work of American home economists Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose in 1923 was rewarded with the Dean’s Fellowship in the History of Home Economics. She holds a PhD in political history (2016) from Antwerp University.
