Brigitte Meijns is Professor at the Research Group Middle Ages of the Department of History at KU Leuven. She studied Modern History and Medieval Studies at KU Leuven and obtained a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies (DEA) at the Centre d'Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (CESCM) of the Université de Poitiers. In 1999 she obtained her PhD with a dissertation on the history of the canonical order in the County of Flanders from the Merovingian Period until c. 1155 (Leuven University Press, 2000). After her mandate as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (2000-2009), with research stays at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) and the School of Historical Studies (IAS, Princeton), Brigitte Meijns became a lecturer at KU Leuven. From 2016 until 2019 she was Head of the Department of History. From 1 August 2019 until 25 October 2021, she was Vice-Dean for International Affairs at the Faculty of Arts. She sat as an expert on the Cult3-committee (History and Archaeology) of the Research Foundation Flanders (2019-2021). Currently, Prof. Meijns is on a sabbatical leave (1 September 2022-31 August 2023).  

Prof. Meijns is a specialist of the religious history of the Early and High Middle Ages. She has a particular interest in the history of the ordo canonicus and in the dynamics of foundations and reforms of communities of canons in the Low Countries and France. Together with Prof. Gert Partoens (KU Leuven), she is currently leading a Research Foundation Flanders-project on the genesis of the canonical reform movement on the basis of normative texts in hithertoo overlooked manuscripts (9th-11th centuries). She has recently supervised research projects on episcopal power and on the importance of ecclesiastical meetings in the Church Province of Reims in the Post-Carolingian period and the eleventh century. In addition, she is interested in the formation of the religious landscape from the Merovingian period onwards and in the role of saints' and relic veneration in this process, as well as in the impact of the eleventh-century Church reform on local power relations. 

Since the foundation of LECTIO, the Leuven Centre for the Study of the Transmission of Texts, Ideas and Images in Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance, Brigitte Meijns has been a member of its steering committee. She sits on the editorial board of, among others, the Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique/Louvain Journal of Church History and Sacris Erudiri. A Journal of Late Antique and Medieval Christianity. She is the Flemish representative on the board of the Dutch Research School for Medieval Studies and she is a member of the Flemish Heraldic Council (Flemish advisory committee for heraldry within the Royal Commission for Monuments and Sites). 
Phone: +3216324998