I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Ghent. I research the debates about reparations for slavery in the United States and France. I describe these debates as a political struggle over the construction of time itself. My work draws on recent scholarship within the philosophy of history on ‘presence’ and historical distance specifically referring to Derrida, Ankersmit, Osborne and my supervisor Berber Bevernage. I am also especially interested in phenomenological arguments about the experience of temporality and history, in particular the work of Ricoeur and Heidegger .
In addition to this research I teach a course at Ghent University on African American history since 1865. I am particularly interested in the historiography of Civil Rights and Black Power and in the commemorative practice of Black History Month.