Leen Engelen will be joining the Kolleg as a Mercator Fellow from November 1 to November 30, 2021.

She is a film and media historian based in Belgium. She teaches at LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven and is a senior researcher on the B-Magic project (researching the magic lantern in Belgium) at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests include the history of film and cinema-going, media and film during the First World War, cultures of spectacle, visual media such as the magic lantern, stereo photography and the panorama and ephemera such as picture postcards and film posters. She teaches in the fields of film – and media history and media archaeology. At LUCA school of arts she supervises several (artistic) research projects. Leen is president of the International Association for Media and History (www.iamhist.net).

Leen has published on film and visual culture in journals such as First World War Studies and the journal of the International Panorama Council. Her most recent books are a general audience publication titled Cine Zoologie. How film saved the Antwerp Zoo (with Roel Vande Winkel. Letterwerk, 2018) and an edited collection that goes by the title Revival after the Great War. Rebuild, Remember, Repair, Reform (published by Leuven University Press in 2020). She is currently preparing a special issue on cultures of spectacle in occupied Belgium (1914-1918 & 1940-1944) for the Journal of Belgian History (BTNG) and a podcast series on the panorama phenomenon.