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KU Leuven
Interfaculty Centre for Agrarian History (ICAG)
The Interfaculty Centre for Agrarian History (ICAG, KU Leuven) is a research centre founded in 2001. The ICAG’s aim is to support, stimulate and launch ongoing and new scientific research on agricultural and rural development and the food system in Flanders and Belgium, in its international context.
As a meeting point of specialists from multiple scientific disciplines, the ICAG gives priority to comparative multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on history, heritage and current transformations in the agricultural sector, the food system and the countryside as a result of the interaction between soil, landscape, spatial planning, agricultural science and technology, demography, economy, government policy, public opinion, ideologies, social movements, etc.
The ICAG develops three lines of research: 1) landscape, environment and climate; 2) knowledge networks and communication; 3) food systems. More info about research projects, publications and staff can be found using the website button below.
ICAG works closely together with the Centre for Agrarian History (CAG ngo), a heritage expertise centre.
Yves Segers (Dendermonde, 1970) studied History at the University of Ghent and Archival and Contemporary Records Management at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He obtained his PhD in Modern History at KU Leuven in 2002 with a thesis on ‘Economic growth and living standards. The development of private consumer expenditure and food consumption in Belgium, 1800-1913’.
He is director of the Interfaculty Center for Agrarian History (ICAG) at KU Leuven, director of the Center for Agrarian History (CAG ngo, a heritage expertise center), and associate professor of Rural History at the research unit Modernity & Society 1800-2000 (MoSa) of the Faculty of Arts , KU Leuven. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with as main themes agriculture and countryside, the development of the food chain and food culture.
In recent years he has conducted research on the agricultural history of the Belgian Congo, which has resulted in the following publications:
- Charlotte Vekemans and Yves Segers, ‘Settler farming, agricultural colonization and development in Katanga (Belgian Congo), 1910-1920’, Historia Agraria, 2020, 81, pp. 195-226.
- Yves Segers and Leen Van Molle, ‘L’agriculture dans le Congo colonial. Un succès aux dépens de la population rurale?’, in Idesbald Goddeeris, Lauro Amandine and Guy Vantemsche (eds.), Le Congo colonial. Une histoire en questions, Waterloo, Renaissance du Livre, 2020, pp. 167-181.
- Leen Van Molle, Yves Segers and Stephanie Kerckhofs, ’”C’est par la science qu’on colonise”. Over de relatie tussen de Grote Depressie en de landbouwpolitiek in Belgisch Congo’, in Jan Vanderlinden (ed.), The Belgian Congo between the two world wars, Brussels, Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences, 2019, pp. 159-189.
