Wannes Dupont
Humanities (History)
Assistant Professor
Email: wannes.dupont@yale-nus.edu.sg
A historian of modern Europe, Assistant Professor Wannes Dupont obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp. His dissertation was awarded the biennial Jan Gillis prize for important work in the history of scientific thought by Belgium’s Royal Academy for the Arts and Sciences. He has since been a Belgian American Education Foundation (BAEF) Cabeaux-Jacobs Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation. From 2012 onwards, he served as a chair of the European Social Science History Conference’s (ESSHC) Sexuality Network. Recently, he was awarded the Royal Academy’s annual science communication award for a work on gay and lesbian history aimed at a wide audience that he co-authored.
Asst Prof Dupont’s research focuses primarily on the history of sexuality and biopolitics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. His comparative dissertation, currently being revised for publication, examined the protracted discursive silence on homosexuality in Belgium to formulate questions about the construction of a historiographic master narrative largely based on French, German and British sources. He has also published on religion and the politics of contraception.
Presently, Asst Prof Dupont is working on a transnational history of the upsurge in homophobia in early pos-twar Europe and on another project concerned with the intersections of demography, biopolitics and sexuality within the Catholic church from 1940s to the 1970s.
Edited Volumes
with Elwin HOFMAN and Jonas ROELENS (eds.), Verzwegen Verlangen. Een geschiedenis van homoseksualiteit in België [Concealed Desires. A History of Homosexuality in Belgium], Antwerp: Vrijdag, 2017.
with Henk DE SMAELE (eds.), Hedendaagse geschiedenis van de seksualiteit in België – L’histoire contemporaine de la sexualité en Belgique [Contemporary Histories of Sexuality in Belgium], special issue of: Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis – Revue Belge d’Histoire Contemporaine, 38/3-4, 2008.
Journal Articles
“Pas de Deux, Out of Step. Diverging Chronologies of Homosexuality’s (De)Criminalization in the Low Countries”, Tijdschrift voor genderstudies — Journal for Gender Studies, 22/4, 2019, 321-338.
“The Two-faced Fifties. Homosexuality and Penal Policy in the International Forensic Community (1945-1965)”, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 28/3, 2019, 357-395.
“L’Homosexualité européanisée. Politiques pénales et débats sexologiques transnationnaux à Interpol, l’OMS et l’ONU pendant les années 50, Sextant, 2019, accepted.
“The Case for Contraception. Medicine, Moralité and Sexology at the Catholic University of Leuven (1930-1968)”, Histoire, médecine et santé, 13, Summer 2018, in print.
“Modernités et homosexualités belges [Belgian Modernities and Homosexualities]”, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, 119, 2012, 19-34.
“Pederasten op de Place royale. Een fragment uit het vergeten verleden van Brussel [Pederasts on the Place royale]”, Leidschrift. Historisch tijdschrift, 26/1, 2011, 79-91.
“Les ‘trous’ de Bruxelles. Les lieux de rencontre homosexuels au 19e siècle [Brussels’ Dives. The Queer Haunts of 19th-Century Brussels]”, Les Cahiers de la Fonderie. Revue d’histoire sociale et industrielle de la Région bruxelloise, 44, 2011, 49-53.
“Over vrijplaatsen [On Hetertopias]”, Het ondraaglijk besef, 14, 2008, 28.
with Henk DE SMAELE, “Orakelen over de heimelijkheid. Seksualiteit in de Belgische historiografie [Prophesizing about Intimacy]”, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis – Revue Belge d’Histoire Contemporaine, 38/3-4, 2008, 273-296.
“Een steriel debat over (homo)seksualiteit? [A Sterile Debate on (Homo-)Sexuality?]”, Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 10/4, 2007, 36-44.
“‘Sie eens ‘t verzwakte volk’ De bestrijding van pest in Antwerpen tijdens de vijftiende en de zestiende eeuw [‘Behold the People’s Weakened State. Fighting Plague in 15th- and 16th-Century Antwerp]”, Tijdschrift voor Stadsgeschiedenis, 2/2, 2007, 85-104.
Book Chapters
with Sarah BRACKE and David PATERNOTTE, “Personne n’est prophète dans son pays: le militantisme anti-genre en Belgique”, in: Roman KUHAR and David PATERNOTTE (eds.), Campagnes anti-genre en Europe. Des mobilisations contre l’égalité, Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 79-97.
DUPONT Wannes, “Arc en ciel”, in: Amandine LAURO, Valérie PIETTE, Caroline SÄGESSER et al. (eds.), Mai ’68 ranconté par les objets, Brussels: Couleur livres, 2018, 26-30.
with Aude FAUVEL, “Gheel, la ‘ville des fous’. Um mythe séculaire, une pratique méconnue (1860-2010)”, in: Alexandre KLEIN, Hervé GUILLEMAIN and Marie-Claude THIFAULT (eds.), La fin de l’asile? Histoire de la déshospitalisation psychiatrique dans l’espace francophone au XXe siècle, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018, 25-37.
“Of Human Love. Catholics Campaigning for Sexual Aggiornamento in Post-War Belgium”, Alana HARRIS (ed.), The Schism of ’68. Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945-1975, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 49-71.
with Sarah BRACK and David PATERNOTTE, “No Prophet is Accepted in his Own Country. Anti-Gender Activism in Belgium”, in: Roman KUHAR and David PATERNOTTE (eds.), Anti-gender campaigns in Europe: Religious and Political Mobilizations against Equality, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 41-58.
“In Good Faith. Belgian Catholics’ Attempts to Overturn the Ban on Contraception”, in: Cécile VANDERPELEN-DIAGRE and Caroline SÄGESSSER (eds.), La Sainte-Famille. Sexualité, filiation et parentalité dans l’Église catholique, Brussels: Éditions de l’Unversité de Bruxelles, 2017, 67-76.
“Catholicisme et évolution des mœurs sexuelles dans la Flandre belge”, in: Alain GIAMI and Gert HEKMA (eds.), Révolutions sexuelles, Paris: La Musardine, 2015, 329-353.
“Catholics and Sexual Change in Flanders”, in: Gert HEKMA and Alain GIAMI (eds.), Sexual Revolutions, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 81-98.
DUPONT Wannes, “Modernités et homosexualités belges [Belgian Modernities and Homosexualities]”, in: Mirande LUCIEN and Patrick CARDON (eds.), Georges Eekhoud. Un illustre uraniste, Montpellier: GayKitschCamp, 2012, 82-88.
“Modernités et homosexualités belges [Belgian Modernities and Homosexualities]”, in: Mirande LUCIEN and Patrick CARDON (eds.), Georges Eekhoud. Un illustre uraniste, Montpellier: GayKitschCamp, 2012, 82-88.
Weimar Berlin: Urbanity and Sexology Before the Nazis
Modern Social Theory
Human Lives: From Biopolitics to Geopolitics
Sexuality in Modern Europe and Its Empires