Raf de Bont

Background

About Raf de Bont

Raf de Bont holds the chair History of Science and the Environment at the History Department, Maastricht University. He studied history at the University of Leuven and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2005, he took his doctoral degree with a thesis on the reception(s) of evolution theory in Belgium. He has been a postdoc at the University of Leuven and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University and Imperial College London. De Bont's research interest concerns the history of science and the environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He particularly published on human-animal relations, scientific ecology and nature protection, the relation between laboratory and field biology, degeneration and evolution theories, and the representation of science (and scientists) in culture at large. In 2020 he was granted a NWO VICI subsidy for the project 'Moving Animals: A History of Science, Media and Policy in the Twentieth century', which studies the changing relation of humans with undomesticated animals that move (or are being moved) over large distances. His books include Darwins kleinkinderen. De evolutietheorie in België, 1865-1945 [Darwin's Grandchildren. Evolutionary Theory in Belgium, 1865-1945](Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2008) and Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).