PhD Defence Posthumus alumnus Jasper Segerink

On 14 February 2025, Posthumus alumnus Jasper Segerink (cohort 2020) successfully defended his thesis ‘The Lodging House and the City. Accommodating Migrants in Urban Space, Antwerp, 1850-1914’ to obtain his PhD from the University of Antwerp at the Felixarchief in Antwerp.

Jaspers dissertation studies the lodging house sector and its relation to changes in migration and urbanisation in Antwerp during the late nineteenth century (ca. 1850-1914). Although omnipresent in the historical cityscape, the lodging house features only scarcely in the works of historians. This dissertation aims to fill in this gap by treating the lodging house is treated both as an expression of these transition – and thus a peculiar historical phenomenon meriting an understanding of its own internal mechanisms – and a lens on them, a key site to investigate how such transformations reverberated in the lives of ordinary people. With this goal in mind, this thesis adopts an approach that is fundamentally spatial and relational across scales. This method is applied through novel digital tools like GIS-mapping and building biographies, to a broad variety of sources ranging from police documents, legislative texts, population and lodging registers, newspapers, and historical novels and imagery.

The N.W. Posthumus Institute staff congratulates Jasper with obtaining his PhD!