Edurne De Wilde Is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History.

More information about Edurne de Wilde

Research

Edurne De Wilde is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History and part of the NWO project “Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History”. Her research considers the modern afterlives of Francis Bacon’s theory of the idols, a theory which the English philosopher and statesman introduced in his famous Novum Organum (1620). Her thesis examines how and why various 19th- and 20th-century scholars continued to appeal to Bacon’s theory. By comparing modern scholars’ creative appropriations of Bacon’s idols, her project tests the hypothesis that Bacon’s idols were rhetorically utilised by polemical thinkers, mainly to expose and condemn what they perceived as poor scholarship and to anchor their innovative understandings of objectivity and scientific method in time-honoured language. It is these rhetorical strategies and acts of anchoring that are at the heart of her research project.

Curriculum vitae

Edurne De Wilde completed her BA in History at KU Leuven in 2017. As part of her BA she studied abroad for a year at Leiden University. Subsequently, she enrolled in the Research MA in History at Leiden University. She graduated (cum laude) in 2019 in the specialisation ‘Cities, Migration and Global Interdependence’. She is the managing editor of the Belgian-Dutch historical journal Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis and a contributor to and editor of the history blog Over de Muur.