Inventing Futures Fellow 2027
Liesbeth Corens
Liesbeth Corens is an early modern historian specialising in the history of mobility and archives with a particular focus on Catholic communities in England and the Dutch Republic. Her first book was published by Oxford University Press in 2019 and entitled Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe. She is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and for this academic year holds a Leverhulme research fellowship to work on her next monograph tentatively called Counter-archiving and the survival of Dutch and English Catholic minorities.
At Durham, she will contribute to the Inventing Futures work. She will investigate the role of archives in simultaneously preserving a distinct religious community and forging connections. Building on the work of the ‘Forging Social Solidarities during Religious Wars’ project, this research explores the nebulous grounds on which connections could be sought, beyond a simple dichotomy between majority and minority, victim and perpetrator. The realm of archives provides an insightful forum to query these dynamics, reliant as it is various modes of authentication – provenance, trust, ius archivii, etc – which cannot be solely reduced to the violence of confessional conflict.
