Krista De Jonge - Biography#

Krista De Jonge is Professor of History of Architecture at the Department of Architecture at K.U. Leuven - University of Leuven, and also at the Department of Art History; moreover, she teaches at the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation at the same University. She is Head of the Architecture & Society Section, (former) Director of Research of her Department, (former) Programme Director of the Master of conservation of Monuments and Sites, and (former) member of the Research Council of her University.

Her personal research concerns 15th-, 16th- and early 17th-century architecture in the Southern Low Countries in its relationship to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark and Portugal, and especially the architecture of the Burgundian and Habsburg Court; she has also directed programmes in other fields, amongst others construction history and history of engineering.

Krista De Jonge is internationally well known for her work on the Renaissance of the Low Countries, particularly in the field of architecture; through interdisciplinary collaboration with archaeologists, historians, et alii, she has been instrumental in rediscovering two major lost sites of this Renaissance (Boussu, Hainaut and Clausen, Luxembourg), which were very influential abroad, amongst others in the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark and Spain. She has in addition laid the basis for the study of Burgundian and Habsburg court residences in the Low Countries, specifically in relationship to the court ceremonial, particularly on the ducal and imperial palace of Brussels.

She is a full member of two national Belgian academies, and sits on all research committees in Belgium where project proposals in her field are evaluated for funding (university level, and French-speaking and Flemish community level). She has also been involved with two federal research institutes (Academia Belgica, Rome and Royal Institute of Artistic Heritage). She was part of several research reviews of Art History (The Netherlands), and serves as reviewer for funding institutions in France, Portugal, Italy and The Netherlands.

In the past fifteen years she has directed seven four-year research programmes funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), two of which in matching-funds collaboration with the University of Utrecht (K.A. Ottenheym), all of them with foreign co-promoters; one is still current. Similarly, she has directed two four-year programmes funded by the Research Fund KU Leuven, and she chairs the European Science Foundation Research Networking Progamme 'PALATIUM', which connects 14 research institutes from 11 European countries. She also co-promoted two policy-oriented programmes on the conservation of monuments and sites (Flemish community), is an advisor on a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and on one funded by the Academy at Göttingen.
Primary partners for international collaboration are the Centre André Chastel, Paris (UMR 8150), Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and CNRS; the University of Utrecht, chair of architectural history; University of Toronto; the Fundación Carlos de Amberes, Madrid; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and the Centre d'Etudes supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours (UMR 7323).

Krista De Jonge has given more than 50 invited presentations to international conferences and seminars during the past ten years, most of which have been published or are in press. She has (co-)organized more than a dozen international meetings during the past five years. Her bibliography of the last five years (2007-2012) comprises five articles in international reviewed journals (ESF A and B, English and French) and one in a local journal (ESF C, Dutch), one book as (main) author (in Dutch), six books as author and editor (in English and French), twenty chapters in international books (chiefly English and French), one chapter in a local book (Dutch), fifteen catalogue entries (French), and seven full papers in conference proceedings (English and French).

She speaks six languages (Dutch, French, English, German, Italian and Spanish) and has knowledge of Portuguese.