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Benoît Henriet obtained his PhD in Contemporary History in 2016 from the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels. In 2017, he was appointed as short-term postdoctoral fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch-Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and, in 2017-2018, as Associate researcher in the Comparing the Copperbelt project led by Prof. Miles Larmer at the University of Oxford. He left this position in October 2018 to become assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Henriet specializes in the history from below, and in the microhistories of (post)colonial Central Africa. He focuses more specifically on vernacular experiences of and responses to state power and to capitalism. He published his first monograph, Colonial Impotence, in 2021, and has steadily contributed to journals including Gender & History, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of African Historical Studies.

As one of the two academic coordinators of DIGICOLJUST-2 and of the fundamental research project REBEL SOLDIERS (“Rebel Soldiers on Trial: Military Agency and its Repression in Colonial Congo (1885-1960)”, funded by a WEAVE partnership between FNRS and FWO), Henriet co-supervises together with Dr. Amandine Lauro doctoral student Brecht Kreynen. Within the project, he researches the epistemic possibilities offered by fragments of ‘subaltern’ voices in the Conseils de Guerre, and how they can contribute to shed light on practices of sense-making, agency and adaptation by Congolese soldiers and colonial ‘subjects’ at large.