Brigitte Herremans is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. She is part of the inter-institutional multidisciplinary iBOF project “Future-proofing human rights: Developing thicker forms of accountability”. She examines the relation between arts and accountability in the Syrian and Palestinian contexts. Her main research interests are Syria, the Palestinian-Israeli question, (transitional) justice efforts, accountability, and literature.
In her doctoral research project (2019-2023), Brigitte investigated the potential of literary writing to counter the erasure and invisibilisation of injustices and to ‘open up’ the justice imagination in the Syrian context. She successfully defended her PhD dissertation in December 2023.
Brigitte studied Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ghent University and International Relations at l’Université Libre de Bruxelles. From 2002 to 2018, she worked as a Middle East policy officer for the development organisation Broederlijk Delen and the peace movement Pax Christi Flanders. In 2016, she co-published a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: ‘Israël en Palestina. De kaarten op tafel.’ From 2017 to 2019, she worked as a policy officer on the Middle East and North Africa at BOZAR, the centre of fine arts in Brussels. In February 2019, she published an essay on how stories feed human rights.
