Dr M. Van Bavel (Marjolein)

Marjolein Van Bavel is an Assistant Professor of Modern Cultural History at Radboud University and a Research Fellow at the University of Antwerp. She specializes in 20th-century gender history and popular culture in Western Europe and North and Latin America. She is fascinated by historical actors who transgressed the dominant social and bodily norms of their time through their professional participation in the field of sports and in the market of sexualised nudity. Her current research examines the complex link between the growing popularity of sports, national identities, and the participation and exclusion of female athletes through a focus on boxing, wrestling, and cycling in Mexico and Belgium.

Marjolein studied History at the University of Antwerp and Gender Studies at University College London. She also obtained her PhD in History at University College London. She worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has been awarded junior and senior postdoctoral fellowships by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). She has conducted research visits at Yale University and El Colegio de México and worked as a lecturer at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia and at KU Leuven.